Over the past two years I've read most of Denis Johnson's published prose. DJ has unique voice - his language is poetic without getting too abstract. He scratches me right where I itch. Like several of his other novels, Tree of Smoke could be classified as a thriller. The story of CIA man Skip Sands, his uncle the Colonel, and a large cast of supporting characters is an exciting romp through Southeast Asia before, during and after the U.S.'s military involvement in Vietman. (Don't be intimated by the length - if you're interested in the subject matter you'll probably find Tree of Smoke to be a page turner rather than a slog.) Even beyond DJ's use of language, plot and characterization, Tree of Smoke is special due to DJ's ability to invoke man's craving for the sublime, the transcendent. I don't know how the component parts create this effect, but they do. Part of it may be that DJ is the rare modern author that takes religious experience seriously. ( )

Michiko Kakutani loved Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, so I was a little hesitant to open it, but seeing that B.R. Myers loathed the book, and he's even more consistently wrong about contemporary fiction than Kakutani, encouraged me to give it a try. I'm glad I did. I believe it was Randall Jarrell who said that "a novel is a work of a certain length that has something wrong with it." I'm unsure of the context in which Schwartz uncorked that summation (which I quote from memory), but I would like to understand him to be saying that yes, because novels are of a certain size, there are always flaws, but those flaws, those Homeric nods, don't make them unworthy. In the plenitude that a maximalist novel such as Tree of Smoke offers there is enough—more than enough—to make the journey worthwhile. Tree of Smoke is a Vietnam novel that will bring to mind Graham Greene (The Quiet American is invoked throughout), but also, and perhaps especially, the Robert Stone of Dog Soldiers, two writers who are always concerned with god—what god's presence—or his absence— entails. The novel starts slowly, but, in the manner of Stone, picks up pace as the characters' tie themselves in moral and spiritual knots. There are flaws: the writing could be tighter, details Johnson uses to build verisimilitude more assiduously checked, but in the end, even with those flaws, Tree of Smoke is an impressive achievement.

Though the novel is primarily about Skip Sands, young CIA recruit, it's also about his uncle, Colonel Francis Sands, a legendary CIA operative; and it's about Kathy Jones, a widowed, saintly Canadian nurse; and Trung, a North Vietnamese spy; and the Houston brothers, Bill and James, misguided GIs who haunt the story's periphery. And it's also about Sgt. Jimmy Storm, whose existence seems to be one long vision quest. As with all of Johnson's work, the real point is the possibility of grace in a world of total mystery and inexplicable suffering. In Johnson's honest world, no one story dominates. For all the story lines, the structure couldn't be simpler: each year, from 1963 (the book opens in the Philippines: 'Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed') to 1970, gets its own part, followed by a coda set in 1983. Readers familiar with the Vietnam War will recognize its arc-the Tet offensive (65 harrowing pages here); the deaths of Martin Luther King and RFK; the fall of Saigon, swift and seemingly foreordained. Skip is a CIA recruit working under his uncle, Francis X. Sands, known as the Colonel. Skip is mostly in the dark, awaiting direction, living under an alias and falling in love with Kathy while the Colonel deals in double agents, Bushmills whiskey and folk history. He's a soldier-scholar pursuing theories of how to purify an information stream; he bloviates in gusts of sincerity and blasphemy, all of it charming. A large cast of characters, some colorful, some vaguely chalked, surround this triad. Given the covert nature of much of the goings-on, perhaps it is necessary that characters become blurred. 'We're on the cutting edge of reality itself,' says Storm. 'Right where it turns into a dream.' Is this our last Vietnam novel? One has to wonder. What serious writer, after tuning in to Johnson's terrifying, dissonant opera, can return with a fresh ear? The work of many past chroniclers- Graham Greene, Tim O'Brien, the filmmakers Coppola, Cimino and Kubrick, all of whom have contributed to our cultural 'understanding' of the war-is both evoked and consumed in the fiery heat of Johnson's story. In the novel's coda, Storm, a war cliché now way gone and deep in the Malaysian jungle near Thailand, attends preparations for a village's sacrificial bonfire (consisting of personal items smashed and axed by their owners) and offers himself as 'compensation, baby.' When the book ends, in a heartbreaking soliloquy from Kathy (fittingly, a Canadian) on the occasion of a war orphan benefit in a Minneapolis Radisson, you feel that America's Vietnam experience has been brought to a closure that's as good as we'll ever get.

Yes, this is a good, complicated story, but have to say: There are too many wanna-be-heroes and messed-up men (boys, really) who get even more messed-up by war and then mess up too many lives in the process of trying to win unwinnable wars (and there are no other kind, folks!) And I get really tired of (frustrated? discouraged? sad? All that and more!) reading about war through men's adolescent eyes and their cynical sense of humor.

"Well, you were sad about the kids for awhile, for a month, two months, three months. You're sad about the kids, sad about the animals, you don't do women, you don't kill the animals, but after that you realize this is a war zone and everybody here lives in it. You don't care whether these people live or die tomorrow, you don't care whether you yourself live or die tomorrow, you kick the children aside, you do the women, you shoot the animals" (p.577).

I really enjoyed the book for the story and the characters. I’m not literary enough to get all the symbolism, nor erudite enough to understand most of the historical context. Are Skip and the Colonel stand-ins for something else? No idea. But they are interesting even without understanding anything deeply.

Despite a decent number of characters, all of whom spend a lot of time interacting with each other, one big result is that every single one is alone. None of them can maintain connections to other people after their Vietnam experience. They live in the same cities as their families, yet cannot call or meet them. All are disconnected from society. This is one depressing novel.

(Full review at my blog) ( )