Tree of Smoke v. Then We Came to the End
presented by
SEMIFINALS
Tree of Smoke
v. Then We Came to the End
Judged by Gary Shteyngart
Gary Shteyngart is the author of the novels The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, the latter of which did real good in the 2007 ToB, placing second. Connections to this year’s competitors: “I had a few beers with Junot once. I had more than a few beers with Jonathan Letham, and blurbed Anya Ulinich.”
I spend most of my productive time bemoaning the collapse of literature, the death of writing, the death of reading, death, death, death. So what am I to make of the year 2007? Three books from this year are going to have a shelf life up to and maybe even beyond the collapse of our own civilization. One about Dominican immigrants, one about the Vietnam War and one about office life. Junot Díaz, Denis Johnson, Joshua Ferris. These are not books, these are entire atmospheres, entire modes of thinking, entire vernaculars. And now I’m supposed to choose between Ferris and Johnson. Why me?
To be honest, when the Rooster people told me I was supposed to read Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, a 614-page book about the Vietnam-freaking-War, I got all huffy. (Full disclosure: I eat pho about once a month, a good friend of mine dated a Vietnamese girl pretty seriously, and I once flew over Vietnam on the way to Bangkok.) Here we go, I thought. Here come the innocent grunts being blown to bits, the cynical officers, the hookers with crying babies, the water buffaloes lazily lifting their ears as the whirlybirds above them strafe every conical hat in sight. Yes, Tree of Smoke has all that. But it also has an American soldier tearing out a Vietnamese prisoner’s eyeball so that it dangles by the optic nerve, then turning it around so that he can watch himself be tortured to death. This thing makes the Southeast Asia of Apocalypse Now look like Grenada.
It is also literally impossible to turn away from this book, even when the plot makes zero sense. The Johnsonian dialogue is there, terse and brutal and real, and then there’s the molecular evocation of time and space that made me sweat with jungle humidity. Did Tree of Smoke force me to think hard about wars and the hopelessness of working-class young American males and optic nerve damage and all that? Yes. But listen, this book is something else, too. It’s an entertainment, as gripping as anything those old 19th-century writer dudes used to crank out, only crafted with exacting 21st-century precision. If I could give up a month of my life, I’d read it all over again.
When the Rooster people told me I was supposed to read Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, I was, like, “Goddamn you all to hell.” I had already started reading it and the central conceit of the book—an omniscient “we” that hovers above a failing Chicago ad agency, gently and not-so-gently touching upon the lives of its many troubled workers—just wasn’t doing it for me. But as the pages piled up, I realized what I fool I was. How quickly had I discounted the tragedy of the American workplace (which, by the way, is about to get another excellent treatment in Ed Park’s first novel, Personal Days), how little I understood the centrality of said workplace in the lives of almost everyone I know, and how little I trusted that Ferris could show us the collective mentality of the office while imbuing each worker with so much individuality and grace. This is such a generous author that one is tempted to borrow as much as $8,000 from him and then never give it back. By the time the novel reaches its middle section, where the “we” is dropped to explore the life of one of the agency’s partners who is suffering from breast cancer, you find yourself airlifted into one of the most humane and sympathetic books of the last decade. But it’s not all cancer and jammed copiers. A novel whose most romantic character is named Benny Shassburger should clue you into the book’s abundant (and rather graceful) humor, another way in which Ferris manages to do the impossible: to turn workaday hell into a gripping page-turner.
Ferris or Johnson? Johnson or Ferris? Shit, I don’t know. How do you chose between two excellent novels that have nothing in common, other than the fact that they make you believe in the whole enterprise of literature again? In the end, I’ll give it to Ferris because the last three sentences in his book made me drop my bahn mi, made me run crying for the toilet as life strafed from me above.
Advancing:
Then We Came to the End
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
JOHN: A truly titanic battle between two of the most acclaimed books of the year. This was Duke v. North Carolina, Clinton v. Obama, Alien v. Predator, Steve-O v. his own body.
In past years we often have books advancing merely for being less bad than their challenger. In fact, if memory serves, in 2005 I almost gave Choire Sicha an aneurysm when I chose I Am Charlotte Simmons over Birds Without Wings. To let you know how little I thought of Charlotte Simmons, here’s a portion from that review:
In focusing on an experience (college) that is so widely known, [Wolfe’s] breathless observations are often stale. College students drink, have sex, say “fuck” a lot, and drive SUVs. Surprise! His title character, an academically gifted but sheltered girl from Sparta, N.C., is also patently fraudulent. At one point, another character jokes that it’s like Charlotte’s from Mars. I’d say it’s more like a small box on the surface of Mars. She is naive to the point of impossibility.
And yet, because I’m a simpleton, because I found Birds Without Wings kind of boring, I ended up giving Charlotte Simmons the nod.
But there’s been very little of that this year, which is either a testament to the overall quality of the field, or merely the quirks of the books matched up with their particular commentators. Gary Shteyngart’s review ably demonstrates the significant differences between Tree of Smoke and Then We Came to the End, but nonetheless, both books won him over with their specific charms.
In the end, it’s the young upstart, Ferris, who has received significant praise from the judges in every pairing, who makes it to the Zombie Round. He needs to be careful, though. No less than Thomas Pynchon got knocked out there last year.
KEVIN: In that first tourney, I Am Charlotte Simmons made it all the way to the Final Four. It was one of the most-hyped novels of that year, and possibly this decade (which is how it made our list). It was also one of the most derided. But again, Simmons benefited from low expectations. There are indeed silly passages in that book (one of the things that clearly shocked Wolfe in his months of research on college campuses is that young men don’t part their hair anymore, because he mentions it on every other page) but he can be a keen observer, and the story kind of skips along—in both his fiction and non-fiction Wolfe is almost always an entertaining companion. And the ToB judges kept advancing it because it wasn’t as bad as they’d heard.
This decision, on the other hand, represents an invocation of the unconscious snowboarding scoring system we all keep in our heads. Without putting words in Gary’s mouth I think we can say that Tree of Smoke is a novel of grand ambition, the literary equivalent of attempting a double cork 1260, and gets great admiration as well as a multiplier for difficulty, but, in the minds of all our judges, the execution might not have been 100 percent. Then We Came to the End is a book of slightly lesser ambition, perhaps, but executed perfectly and Ferris nails the landing, if I might mix my snowboarding and gymnastics metaphors.
Today’s match also represents something like redemption for Ferris (not really because this award doesn’t count for anything, but still). He and Johnson were both finalists for the National Book Award, with the N.B.A. going to Tree of Smoke. Interestingly, tomorrow’s match-up is between finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award, with that title having gone to Díaz earlier this month. Is it possible the Rooster could pull off two major award reversals in two days?
JOHN: Yesterday, I noted the passing of the writer Jon Hassler, and today, let me lament another passing, the apparent end of The Litblog Co-Op. More than one of their picks has wound up in our Tournament of Books, and just as we were lamenting earlier in the Tournament that there are too few non-traditional venues to champion books, another one goes by the wayside.