Thursday, November 15, 2007

Legacy of Smoke, Tree of Ashes

While we were home this past weekend, the latest issue of my Dad's subscription to The Atlantic arrived--the one with Andy Sullivan's ode to Barack Obama on the cover. I was flipping through it and came across a somewhat lengthy review of Denis Johnson's much discussed new novel, Tree of Smoke. The review, by somebody named B.R. Myers, is quite a thing of beauty if you, like me, appreciate a good hatchet job now and then. (If you've been missing Dale Peck since he became nice, you'll love Myers.) I've been looking forward to reading Johnson's book--an opus on, among other things, the CIA and the Vietnam War. It got a rave on the cover of the NYTBR and is the kind of book much discussed by people who listen to NPR and subscribe to Tikkun. (I mean that with only a hint of irony since I am, essentially, one of those people--except for the part about Tikkun.) I'm wondering if it can be as bad as (Ms.? Mr.? What's up with those initials?) Myers says it is. Anyway, I keep flipping around and come across the letters section. It appears that, in a previous issue, Mr. Myers has taken his hatchet to Michael Pollan's Omniviore's Dilemma. Mr. Pollan's book, as we have noted before, is pretty close to brilliant. I have not read the review since I am not a subscriber and it is not free on the interwebs for plebs like me, but I gather, from the letters I read, that Mr. Myers is accusing Pollan of being insensitive to the plight of animals. All I can say about that is that it pretty much the opposite of the truth. One begins to worry about Mr. Myers' sanity.

Anyway, I awake this morning to discover that Tree of Smoke has won the National Book Award for fiction. What are we to make of this? For the moment, one of two positions seems appropriate. First, Myers is right and the entire literary elite is suffering false consicsiousness (or, possibly, Bush Derangement Syndrome). Second, Myers is full of shit. I suppose the only way to really settle this is to sit down and read Tree of Smoke and decide for myself if it is any good. For the moment, however, we'll go with position number two.

Speaking of the National Book Awards, Tim Weiner's excellent book about the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, won the nonfiction prize. Concerned that most of our knowledge about the CIA came from spy novels, we read this book several months ago and meant to blog about it. Alas, it was not to be. However, if you are interested in reading an intelligent and not-very-long discussion of Legacy of Ashes, you might want to check out Scott McLemee's review ici.

This was supposed to be a shorter post that also talked about Weeds, Duran Duran, and our blogroll, but we have gone on too long. Perhaps more later.

Posted by jwb at 10:00 AM   

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