Wesley Glover’s Reviews > Tree of Smoke > Status Update

“You’re sad about the kids, sad about the animals, you don’t do the women, you don’t kill the animals, but after that you realize this is a war zone and everybody here lives in it. You don’t care whether these people live or die tomorrow, you don’t care whether you yourself live or die tomorrow, you kick the children aside, you do the women, you shoot the animals.”

A poem doesn’t have to rhyme. It just has to remind you of things and wring them out of you.

ambitious, dense and perplexing, partly because it’s hard to imagine that the author of Tree of Smoke was never involved in the Vietnam and was just a teenager at the time. It can be a slog at times because the cut up vignettes of CIA operatives don’t feel connected in a traditional novelistic sense. On a bizarre note, in structure it reminds me of “The Morning Star”.

DFW hangover reading, first book I can stomach post IJ.. nobody warned me about this!