Spoiler Alert:




I also read a lot into the Calvinist angle of the novel. But I think he used religion as a larger metaphor, as a way to offer redemption for the US's failed foreign policy of the 1960's and 70's. Thats why the novel ends with Kathy Jones, the tormented aid worker who is drawn to the dark ideas of Calvinism, believing that some souls were made and destined to go to hell. This idea is so black and white, thinking that some people are just evil and some are just good, much like how the US viewed Vietnam and Communism in general. And yet the mind set clearly didn't work in Vietnam; all we were left with was this Tree of Smoke (which in many ways reminded me of the Fog of War, the documentary about Robert McNamara who was Secretary of Defense from 61 to 68.) This confusion caused many good people to make morally compromising decisions in the name of "fighting evil". But most ended up commiting atrocities that were every bit as evil as what the enemy was doing. Thus, Johnson's ending is a message of redemption to the United States and a statement of equality to people around the world.: "All will be saved" Calvinism is just another myth that needed to be burst in order to move foward, much the same way that containment, or the domino effect were myths about communism in South East Asia that needed to be burst in order to move on. The sad thing is that we are right back in the same situation in Iraq. And Johnson knows this all to well as he couldn't accept his National Book Award in person, he was on assignment in Baghdad.

I started into the 18-disc audio version of this book and was quickly drawn in. Great narrator, and a structure that reminds me of Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried." But what I like most about the book -- and which hasn't been commented on here yet -- is the religious angle. I discovered an interview with Norman Rush that touched on this before I came to the first mentions (I think they were the first) of God and faith, toward the end of disc 2:

http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/se...

"Pretty much everything I have to say about Tree of Smoke is in my NYRB review of it, really. Does this excerpt, from the end of that review, address your question? “Denis Johnson appears, in Tree of Smoke, to be dramatizing what he takes to be the consequences, in one war, of a widespread failure to believe in God. On the other hand, Johnson also seems to offer a companion suggestion that God, like the metaphorical God in the novel, Colonel Francis X. Sands, is powerful, mysterious, and ineffectual—the classic deus absconditus. I suspect that Johnson didn't intend this last conclusion to be drawn. There are strong clues to his true position in this matter in the last few pages of the book, and preeminently in its last two lines—which I won't cite, since so much rests on their interpretation. The reader will judge."

I'm only approaching the halfway point and don't know anything about those last few lines, so if you want to delve into them, please precede your comments with a "Spoilers" tag. Otherwise, in general, did those who read the book have any inkling of what Johnson is getting at. His stabs at Calvinism are particularly intriguing, and rooted in ideas about how to discuss predestination that go back to the Westminster Confession of Faith, and earlier.

I'll have to check up on his other work. The book is smashing, so far.

Sorry, but I did not enjoy this book. The "non-linear" style sometimes distracted I thought. I would rather have had a simpler timeline since the characters were almost always so conflicted anyway.

Ed, I'm reading it now too. The non-linearity makes it interesting, to see the ways the themes are emerging, patterns in lives are overlapping, right? It also makes the build-up toward war (and the characters' arrival) in Vietnam somersault forward in an inevitable way, perhaps the same way that war today seems driven ahead by a political engine that ordinary people can't capture in a freeze frame.
I'm heading on the road with no internet for awhile with the book as my companion. Good luck...and share your thoughts when you're through?

I'm reading this now--would like to discuss the book with anyone currently reading it as well. Love the non-linear structure....sort of throws me into the story.