Two Questions for Norman Rush on the NBA

Q: What do you think it means to have a book like "Tree of Smoke" win the National Book Award?”

A: 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.

Left out of this work of fiction, of course, is the historical fact that true believers, religious and political leaders with no doubt at all of the truth of their religious views, were all over the Vietnam War, from Francis Cardinal Spellman to the Buddhist establishment in South Vietnam. I just mention it.

Tree of Smoke joins the corporal's guard of truly significant novels about the Vietnam War—works such as The Quiet American, Going After Cacciato, Dog Soldiers, The Things They Carried, Meditations in Green.... Denis Johnson has created an absorbing, provocative work of art. It asks the great question, Unde malum?—Where does evil come from? It may not answer it persuasively for all, but it answers it movingly.”

Maybe that doesn’t tell what it means that Tree of Smoke won the NBA. But . . .what I think about it is that Denis Johnson’s book is a serious work and a worthy choice. I should mention that the field of nominees this year was very strong.

Q: What did it mean for you when “Mating” won?

A: I’m sure every NBA winner will tell you the same thing. It cheers you up and changes your life, to win the award. Doors open that were closed, gigs are offered that wouldn’t have been (and it guarantees that you’ll get annual update forms to fill out from Who’s Who forever).

Incidentally, Mating was in fact the second novel I’d written. (My first published book, Whites, was a short story collection.) That first novel was rejected by approximately every publisher in the world. (For this, I thank God.) The NBA recognition of Mating meant more to me than it would have against a different background, I’m sure.

Norman Rush is the author of "Whites," a National Book Award finalist, "Mating," a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a National Book Award winner, and "Mortals," which is available in paperback from Vintage. He is at work on a new novel, "Subtle Bodies."