Tree of Smoke v. Ovenman
presented by
ROUND ONE
Tree of Smoke
v. Ovenman
Judged by Tobias Seamon
TMN Contributing Writer Tobias Seamon is the author of the novel The Magician’s Study (Turtle Point Press) and a chapbook of poetry Loosestrife Along the River Styx (Foothills Publishing). He recently wrote and directed the short film Amerikan Partizan, which premiered at the 2007 Edwood Film Festival. He lives with his wife in Albany, N.Y. Connections to this year’s competitors: None known.
There’s no comparison between Jeff Parker’s Ovenman and Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke. Parker’s slacker comedy about a ne’er-do-well of the restaurant world is fun enough, though the cutesiness—a main character named When, his girlfriend Marigold, and a dog called Left—can be a bit much. Parker does a nice job of showing that those poor gimps sweating it out in the back of your local pizza joint have actual lives and painful failures. Then again, did anyone think otherwise?
Tree of Smoke, on the other hand, is a masterpiece. Following Armageddon, when a few half-mad survivors try to understand how it all went wrong, they’ll place Tree of Smoke on the same shelf as Heart of Darkness, Blood Meridian, and War and Peace. An epic of human folly within the deranged circumstances of the Vietnam War, the story focuses on CIA operative Colonel Francis Sands and his nephew-slash-protégé Skip Sands. Frustrated by America’s muddled tactics, the Colonel becomes a kind of well-meaning Kurtz and begins an unauthorized program of psychological warfare. This isn’t merely a spy thriller, however, and Johnson’s Vietnam is populated with surreal misanthropes, Vietnamese families desperate to escape the maelstrom, bereaved missionaries, scientists studying endangered monkeys, and the tragedy of the Houston brothers, James and Bill. Coming from a dead-end life in Phoenix—as much of a wilderness outpost as the jungle landing zones—the souls of both are devoured by the horrors they witness, or perpetrate. Johnson details this huge cast with depth and exquisite sympathy, and by the end readers will be left stunned and wondering whether their own lives drift on the tree of smoke. Denying the power and authenticity of this novel is like when a despairing widow talks to a doctor amidst the burning ruins of a monkey clinic:
“We’re in a horrible place.”
“It’s a fallen world.”
“I can’t contradict you. That would be stupid.”
Advancing:
Tree of Smoke
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
JOHN: Well, Kevin, just like my prostate, The Morning News’s Tournament of Books continues to get bigger every year and I couldn’t be prouder to once again join you in the color-commentary booth as we watch these 16 competitors battle it out for literary supremacy and the coveted “Rooster.” I’m ready for the action, having read to completion four of the 16 titles, and having tried to read a fifth. I’ve also spent the winter trying to come up with new cock jokes in order to make maximum comedic hay out of our unique and special prize.
Here’s one I’ve been working on that may need some tweaking (you’ve got to read it Andrew Dice Clay-style):
Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: Because there was a rooster on the other side and she really liked cock! Ohhhhhhh!
As always, we’ve got of the heaviest of hitters (McEwan, Johnson) mixed with the mid-career up-and-comers (Patchett, Díaz, Vida, Clark), and the promising rookies (Tom McCarthy, Joshua Ferris), not to mention an honest-to-goodness, audience-crossing genre novel (Lippman). Last year, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road entered as the prohibitive favorite and exited with the Rooster, which he roasted on a spit next to that dead baby. This year, the competition looks about as wide open as Paris Hilton’s vagina.
Ohhhhhhhhhh!
So here we have one of the Tournament favorites, an award-winner from a major house versus a lesser-known title from an indie press (Tin House) that’s had some strong successes both commercially and critically.
But in this case, the juggernaut of Denis Johnson rolls to an easy victory according to Judge Seamon.
I think just about every M.F.A. grad in America has a copy of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. I have three. I used to have 11, purchased at $3 apiece at a remainder sale after I’d already read it because I knew at some point I’d be telling someone else that they just had to read the book, and rather than trusting them to go score one on their own, I could give them one of my three-buck specials. The stories in that book are miraculous—funny, despairing, uplifting, surprising—the conclusion of one of them, “Work,” caused me to burst into tears at the end because of its sheer beauty and rightness.
Now, I’m no B.R. Myers (speaking of dickheads), who savaged Tree of Smoke in The Atlantic Monthly, but I tried to read Tree of Smoke and couldn’t get past page 60.
I blame me.
Cock!
KEVIN: B.R. Myers is still around, huh? I stopped reading The Atlantic around the time I started procreating and my adult reading time was drastically reduced, first by the procreating itself, then by Dr. Seuss, which was OK, but more recently in favor of graphic novelizations of Scooby-Doo episodes, usually the same episodes we just watched on TV. A couple of years ago they started making new Scooby-Doos and the one improvement they made is that Daphne wears a lot less clothes. There’s this one where the gang takes a cruise to Australia and she’s wearing this purple bikini. And then there’s one where they go to Hawaii and she’s wearing a flower-print bikini. And there’s one where they’re in Egypt and she’s wearing this, like, backless sarape. I’ve become something like a Mr. Skin of Scooby-Doo. I can tell you what Daphne is or isn’t wearing pretty much by timecode in each episode, which I now enjoy with pipe tobacco and a glass of Cabernet.
What were we talking about? Oh yeah, B.R. Myers. Is he still around? The last time I checked in he still hadn’t recommended a book that had been written in my lifetime. Here’s a bunch of thrillers he doesn’t like. And over here he talks about how Elmore Leonard used to be good, but started losing his touch somewhere around 1969, when B.R. was six.
I like that he dismisses Johnson without reading Jesus’ Son, which is hilarious because Jesus’ Son is not only brilliant, it’s shorter than “Scooby-Doo and the Aztec Mummy” (no doubt it would be shorter than a B.R. Myers review of it). The sad thing is, I agree with him that there are posers out there who think a novel is good only because they don’t understand it. Myers, though, apparently thinks everyone in the world (except him) is pretending to understand everything they read. Which would really be weird. That would be a good premise for a sci-fi novel, although it would be sad if someone actually wrote it and B.R. Myers couldn’t understand it.
I almost forgot B.R. Myers isn’t a judge in this tournament. Tobias Seamon is. If you get the chance, read Tobias Seamon’s novel The Magician’s Study.
I totally got it.