It’s a rare review that can change one’s mind about a book he has deeply enjoyed—so rare that B. R. Myers’s Atlantic piece on Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke is my only personal example. (Myers’s razor-sharp Reader’s Manifesto can be read here.) In October, somewhat to my surprise, I found myself in the choir singing hosannas to Johnson’s National Book Award-winning Vietnam novel. Tree of Smoke was, I thought, both vastly entertaining and a moving addition to the literary evidence for W. T. Sherman’s maxim, “War is hell.” Now I’m a little embarrassed not to have remarked the many howlers that Myers picks out:

There is no point in dwelling on the story line, because even some of the book’s admirers have conceded its sluggishness and overlength—albeit with some humbug about how flaws make a good novel more likable, perfection being such a turnoff, etc. As for the action, it never feels authentic. Soldiers do not laugh in unison or call out frantically for M&M’s during a sudden and intense firefight, nor would a soldier crawling through bush find the attendant lacerations “exhilarating.” Not once does the reader feel fear or tension. . . . [O]ne thinks only of the silver-screen ‘Nam and of Life, not life, feeble substitutes for the riches to be had from Michael Herr’s Dispatches and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

Crawling through the thicket of Johnson’s prose, I did find the lacerations exhilarating. There was something about the language, overblown and inexact, that seemed perfectly suited to the subject matter. In A Reader’s Manifesto, Myers presents a very different take on that kind of anti-style. “Like [Annie] Proulx and so many others today,” he writes, “[Cormac] McCarthy relies more on barrages of hit-and-miss verbiage than on careful use of just the right words.” I’d say that applies to Johnson as well.

Tree of Smoke is in many ways a remarkable achievement. For all it gets wrong, it’s a tremendous effort of imagination; I don’t doubt, as Myers claims to, that the critics loved reading it. Still, I’ll admit that it falls wide of the mark, that the praise should have been tempered with a more careful consideration of the shortcomings. A final question for Myers, though: Where were you when I called for air support on the problem of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road? Now that’s a review I’d pay to see.