Without really thinking about anything at all, he squeezed the trigger.” Johnson’s prose matches the raw enormity of the revelation: “Seaman Houston felt his own stomach tear itself in two. Houston shoots it: “He raised the barrel a few degrees and took the monkey’s head into the sight. We follow Houston through the jungle until he stumbles on a small monkey. The scope of the prose is wide-“ten thousand sounds of the jungle”-and personal-“pulse snickering in the heat of his flesh, and the creak of sweat in his ears.” Few writers can toggle between operatic registers and sneaky details as well as he could, and he flexes all these muscles in this short early scene. Johnson begins on a grand scale, his first sentence reporting the death of President Kennedy, before he squares up on a sobering up William Houston, wandering through the jungle in the Philippines, looking for wild boar to shoot. The book centers on CIA officer William Sands and the soldier brothers James and William Houston, set amidst the Vietnam War. When I heard last week that Denis Johnson had died, I thought immediately of the opening pages of Tree of Smoke.
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