coldhearted scientist وداد

From Keith Gessen’s Gracelands:

…But the book was also about hitchhikers, misfits and especially drug addicts–its title came from the Velvet Underground’s ode to heroin–and this put it in a different tradition, less of Carver’s suburban miniatures of desperation than of the American hopped-up song of the open road.

…Tree of Smoke traces the gradual American descent into Vietnam. It follows Bill Houston through his two tours with the Navy; Bill’s younger brother James, who joins the Army in 1967, just in time for the Tet offensive; the cursing Colonel Sands from the first scene; his nephew Skip Sands, a young CIA operative; and a Vietnamese family collaborating with the Americans. Skip is the book’s central character: his uncle has assigned him the quixotic task of compiling a gigantic catalogue of all known information gathered by the CIA on Vietnam. The code name for this catalogue, which is recorded exclusively on index cards and occupies several footlockers that Skip transports from the Philippines to the States to Saigon, is the Tree of Smoke of the title, and in the process of refreshing the catalogue Skip gradually loses interest in the war.

…For Johnson, Vietnam cannot be an end to American innocence or a fall from grace any more than September 11 or the invasion of Iraq can–America had already fallen from grace, long ago. To forget that and then, having forgotten it, to invade another country; to then claim that it is necessary to invade yet another country (Cambodia, in this instance) to help prosecute the war in the first country–well, that’s a sin.

…With Tree of Smoke, [Denis] Johnson has completed, in reverse chronological order, a moral and mythic history for the twenty-year period between the Kennedy assassination and the first years of the Reagan revolution. Is anyone so vain as to think we no longer inhabit the world he has described?

Axé.