Patrick Pittman

A spy romp from one of our greatest living authors. But just that — a romp, with occasional psychedelic diversions and passages of exquisite prose. The Laughing Monsters reads mostly like Johnson was more excited about the idea of writing an Africa-set espionage thriller than actually figuring out what to do with it. Following Tree of Smoke and Train Dreams, he's more than earned the right to let rip like this, just don't expect anything to linger with you past the closing page.

There's some staggering and beautiful detail hidden in the undergrowth of this book, particularly in the earlier parts, and many new previously unknown texts it revealed, but a couple of things throw it off. Keeping in mind it's written in the early 90s, and that its stated mission is the place of forests in “western” thought, I can almost forgive its overwhelming whiteness and eurocentricity, thought it is a missed opportunity – I wanted to read the version of this book that really wrestled with, or at least nodded to, how humanity as a whole considered the forest as shadow space. Even when it arrives in the Americas at the end, really there's only Thoreau and Frank Lloyd Wright. Secondly, was there not a single damn woman over all these millennia surveyed that had a thought worth noting about forests? Not a one? I can't forgive that for its time of writing. It also degenerates into its second half to a succession of middling lit crit essays about things (poems, paintings, buildings) with trees in them, which is not really what the promising core thesis was about. Alas.