This past November, when he won the National Book Award for his novel Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson couldn’t make it to the ceremony because he was in Iraq reporting a piece for Portfolio. At the time it seemed like strange news. But one can only imagine that, after spending years chained to a monstrous novel, the man felt like a vacation.

As Gregory Cowles recounted the other day on Paper Cuts, the New York Times books blog, Johnson made his absence up to New York with a recent reading and Q&A at the New School. I have to assume that anyone who’s ever read an interview with Johnson would show up mostly for the reading, as he’s notoriously taciturn during question periods. (A favourite of mine from the a National Book Award-sponsored interview last fall: Bret Anthony Johnston: Were there moments in your writing process where you worried the book wouldn’t work? If so, how did you press on? Denis Johnson: Well, I’ve never thought about this before, but now that you ask, it occurs to me I don’t have much interest whether any of my books work or not.)

So most people were probably there for the reading, which, according to Cowles, Johnson introduced like this: “This is from my work in progress. It’s a short novel. Pretty literary stuff. But you’re sophisticated New Yorkers. You can handle it.”

The scene he read was about a gambler in debt to his bookie, the two of them driving around in a Cadillac with a big gun in the glove compartment. The sentences were not trippy or jazzy or mystical or visionary. They were not sprawling. Johnson read a couple of pages, then mugged a double take at his manuscript. “What the —? Where’s the literary? I thought I put something literary in my suitcase, but this is just cheap pulp fiction.” He grinned at us. Really, he explained, this was from a novel that will be serialized in Playboy, about a man down on his luck who meets a damsel in distress. He read on, turning the pages, pausing occasionally to drink from a water bottle or to laugh at one of his lines.

Surely no one was actually surprised. Even if the sentences weren’t particularly looping (which they aren’t always in Johnson, despite Tree of Smoke and everyone all of a sudden deciding they are), it still sounds like he’s working the same ground as before, which is to say finding a way to adopt the techniques of genre and produce something that the book establishment will deem more literary. It seems to me that in all the awards hubub, all the Best.Book.Ever! celebration, we’ve sort of forgotten that Tree of Smoke is a nerdy spy novel.

It’s an easy thing to forget, because the structure of connective meaning that lies at the core of most genre fiction (things gain meaning by their relationship to something else: a villain is bad because his desire is not the good guy’s, a map is valuable because it contains information about something else) collapses in a big old pile of existential emptiness. So while there are spies, they’re spies without a compass, waiting in the woods for something to do. And while there is intelligence, in the form of the Colonel’s file system, its elaborate construction renders it similarly meaningless. To continue the Walrus Blogs’ lit-crit onslaught, I’d suggest that in Tree of Smoke the classic Saussurian sign system breaks down. In the world of the disoriented spy thriller, everything is a signifier, while nothing carries the weight of the signified.

Thus the novel’s MacGuffin, its tree of smoke: a thing that ultimately isn’t a thing, like all of Skip’s assignments, like the actions of the Houston brothers, like the Colonel’s very existence. And to me, at least, the outlook’s even bleaker than that. As the central figure in this whole drama—the mystery who, if allowed to signify something, would lend definition to almost everything else by association—the Colonel is a waste, blurred by Bushmill’s and obsolete in a world of new(er) warfare. The very conflict he has helped create has denied him a meaningful place in the world, and his emptiness spreads out like the arms of the figurative tree he has spent years pruning, laying fallow any field it finds.

(Personal anecdote aside: My friend Patrick White, who just this week won the National Magazine Award for best new writer for his excellent piece “Red Rush” from our April 2007 issue, told me he gave Johnson’s novel to his mother for Christmas based on my raving about its brilliance last fall. She did not like it at all. Maybe, like many genre exercises, this falls into the ‘dude book’ category? [Which is not to say women don’t or can’t like it–many do–but just that, like monster trucks, it’s something toward which you’d think men more naturally inclined. Ed Keenan? I mean, the man’s next book is being serialized in Playboy, after all.])

So a new twist on the old spy thriller, yes, but coming from the same place, to be sure. One hopes that Johnson’s gambling serial does the same sort of thing, which has become something of a trend in literary fiction as of late. Michael Chabon’s post-Wonder Boys work, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (anyone else think this was, like, a total ripoff of The Stand?)—all of these and more have found a new profundity by adapting genre elements of the mid-century. In a sense, it’s a sign of a literature in full health. The confidence required to bring the popular into the elitist means that these authors are comfortable with a new tradition; fortunately for us, it’s an eminently readable one. Michael Chabon’s new collection of essays, out shortly from McSweeney’s, will doubtless take this idea on in full. You can see a sneak preview here.

Tags: books, literature

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Posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 11:17 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.