120 More

Such were the number of pages in Tree of Smoke which I chewed and swallowed this evening as the elbow of a distant storm whipped a few earnest breezes across the Northern Vincennes corridor, but little else. I was finally able to hunker down with the book after piecemeal sniping, much which left me siding with Joel's criticism: a stance, I gleefully note, which is based on a review -- not a reading of the novel.

My humble estimation regards The Quiet American and Dispatches as the most literate, well-grounded approaches to the debacle and catastrophe of Vietnam. I am not sure I would hold Denis Johnson's novel in that esteemed company, but I do regard it well above the ramblings of Robert Stone.