Contrasting views …

… Father, Son, Sinner, Saint - Image Journal.

The church wouldn’t approve of my taking Denis Johnson as a patron saint, but I wonder if he minds. Johnson, son of a diplomat working at the intersection of propaganda and spy craft; published poet at age nineteen, serious drinker and drug addict for the decade that followed; sober, more or less, for the four after that; playwright, teacher, journalist in the world’s worst hellholes; writer of some of the finest short stories and novels to appear in America in the past fifty years, taken by liver cancer in 2017. There are plenty of people who’ve never read him, but it’s hard to find anyone who’s read him—or who knew him—and doesn’t love him. He’s what you might call a blue-collar writer’s writer. He also survived more than one life crash and forged beauty from the ashes. I could use intervention from someone like that.

On the other hand: Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson.

At its pulpy heart Johnson's latest is yet another unthrilling CIA thriller, welded together with the Hollywood-forged boilerplate of conspiracies and mysterious, extragovernmental cabals. Not content to write an honest, mindlessly diverting thriller, Johnson pursues a Big Statement about — what? The course of American empire? Making an unholy pact with the devil? You got me, and I read every one of its 624 pages.

(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I can't comment, since I haven't read anything by Denis Johnson.  But reading — and reviewing — are not exact sciences.