The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 27 February 2008
by Denis Johnson
This is a difficult book to encapsulate in so brief a review. It has layers of story and a complex story-telling structure unlike any other. The bare outline of the tale sounds like something from a pulp thriller. However, the story is far more sensitive and subtle than that. The book sprawls over 20 years, starting in 1963 and encompassing the Vietnam war. Colonel Sands is a CIA operative who has a long and legendary history of adventure, starting with the Burma campaign before the US entered World War 2. We meet him in the Phillipines as he gives his nephew and fellow operative, Skip Sands, his first big assignment in Mindanao. There, Skip seems to serve only as witness to his uncle's machinations, witness to the seemingly meaningless murder of a nearly insane priest. The action shifts rapidly, though, and deep into the conflict in Vietnam. The Colonel has set up what amounts to his own guerilla information gathering base outside of Saigon. Skip is assigned out there, as well, but, again out on the fringes, a kind of chorus and record-keeper for his nutty uncle. We also read the story of two brothers, James and Bill Houston, the latter of whom is just leaving the merchant marine, and the former who dives into the army head first. James volunteers for the craziest and most dangerous assignments, starting with his bold exploration of VC tunnels and ending with violent treks on long range reconnaissance patrols. His is the story of a brutal grunt and the nowhere life from which he springs and to which he returns. Meanwhile, the Colonel drifts further away from the CIA's mission in Vietnam. He cultivates his own sources and persues his own policy there. The war and its affects in Vietnam slowly distort Skip's moral compass. He drifts through the conflict, learning that there is less and less solid ground he can cling to. In the world in which these characters move, almost nothing is as it seems. Nobody sounds even the slightest bit trustworthy. There are numerous supporting characters in this dense book, but the reader might find himself just as confused and lost as the characters. There is so little solid ground here that the book exudes an uneasy feeling, like a ship on a high sea. Much of the story and many of the events are only glancingly described. Major characters are almost casually disposed of. The result is a tale of implication and inference. Even the meaning of the title is never solidly determined. But, this is the thing. This uneasiness is the book's remarkable strength. It evokes an amoral wartime environment that is shot through with desperation and which has no clear historical drift or definite meaning. In other words, a very real sense of modern chaos. Ultimately, all the characters in this book share the same fate. They are doomed. The structure of the book makes it a highly crafted piece of literature. A powerful, vivid literary experience.
(For this novel, Johnson was awarded the 2007 National Book Award for fiction.)