Notes and Thoughts on a Really Long Harper's Review of Tree of Smoke - D. Johnson - Hardcover: 624 pages. 2.2 lbs. (2007)

By Lazlo Kominski

Long review. Long book. Right up there with the big boys but not quite Against the Day at 1085 and 3.4. Anything longer than a Houllebeque novella is bound to tax an evening reading working man. Or even a fella.

Signed up for Harper's when the high school daughter came home with MAGAZINE FUNDRAISER materials. SO MONTHS LATER the first one hits my mailbox to the coffee table. I pick it up as a lifevest here in the living room's ESTROGEN POOL. Waterwings in the teen premenstrual and postmenopausal waves.

There are the Harper's articles, index, bits. So I read the Castro beard piece out loud to the soon to be ex-wife. She finds it surprising that Fidel could be so intelligent. This imploding dissolution comes as no surprise, I tell myself again for the tenth time.

I look in the back of the magazine finding there is an 8-PAGE ESSAY couched as review of Denis (Angels) Johnson's new book about Vietnam and so much more called Tree of Smoke. The reviewer says it starts with an idiot killing a monkey so I may actually BUY and READ this book. Just having finished P.K. Dick's Humpty Dumpty in Oakland with 250 pages, I am ready for a stretch book but my trainer says, "Stay closer to your weight class. Go 350 and let's see."

When you've looked back to think after four or five drinks that Dispatches and Waiting for Cacciato might be the two best books you've read and Apocalypse Now is the best movie, others unschooled in those works may surmise maybe you have some issues.

BOO-YAH! The Others don't listen to The Doors anymore. They probably think Tom Brokaw has equal footing with Dan Rather and the late great Peter Jennings when that ratty little starched preppie flunkie bastard spouted only establishment rhetoric in place of the news. He may write books of disguised propaganda in retirement, but he's no Walter Cronkite. He's barely a Katie Couric. Not that there's anything wrong with that. You know what they say.

They say this writer is a smoking whoring wino listening to loud music who is a drunk which is now a VERY BAD THING. But the 60s were more than sex, drugs, and rock and roll. There was a war to stop. I hear there is a war going on right now. On poverty, drugs, terrorism, oil, and democracy. New fronts are breaking out every day someone dissents or raises a red flag. War on coffee. War on tea. War on me.

So COUNT OFF! Sing the song. 1-2-3 what are we fighting for?

May your best country win. Ready, BREAK!