The New York Times ends their review with the following statement about Dennis Johnson: "He has written a flawed but deeply resonant novel that is bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war."

I like the juxtaposition of “flawed but deeply resonant” to describe this novel. This is quite a book, well written, illusive, thoughtful-- a modern Catch 22 but with less humor. The main character, Skip Sands was the new version of Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. A good hearted, fatherless midwestern, Skip Sands joins the CIA to be under the mentorship of his dynamic, bigger than life Uncle, Colonel Sands. As Skip moves from the menial tasks first assigned ( cataloging names) to the more dangerous assignments ( helping a double agent), he is excited by the whole scenario – suffice it to say he changes a lot. Another part of the novel details two brothers from Arizona who also are affected by their experience, and the novel does a great job of detailing how hard it is for them to move past that experience. There is also Kathy, who works with the orphanages and who at times loves Skip, but her life too will go through the disillusionment of this existence. She reflects: they have “worshipped their own lies, spat on their own dreams, turned their backs on their true beliefs”
By telling the interspersed stories of several characters, Johnson depicts a thoughtful portrait of the Vietnam War. The disillusionment, the gritty reality, the loss of morals --many themes explored in language that is both a challenge and a pleasure to discover. ( )

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.

I love Denis Johnson. I think he is an amazing, mind-blowing author who assembles the most amazing sentences. He has a way of depicting lost souls, whose hells are mostly self-created, and seducing the reader into entering those hells by way of empathy and love. My difficulty in engaging myself with this novel is that I didn’t love the characters in Tree of Smoke. Most of the time, I found them despicable, and at the very least, sad. I think this may be part of the book’s genius. I have no direct experience of Vietnam but what I gather from movies, history books, and documentaries is that this same sinister antipathy pervaded. I don’t really know. War is not my thing.
Tree of Smoke spans the years 1963 through 1970, and juxtaposes the stories of William “Skip” Sands, CIA, working for Psychological Operations against the Vietcong, and brothers, Bill and James Houston, who both enlist in the Army. This 614 page novel is generally about Vietnam, and CIA and military strategies, following not only the American point of view but also entering the lives of various Vietnamese with different backgrounds and involvement in the war. We see amorality on both sides, atrocities against man and animal alike.
For me, personally, Johnson’s genius is cemented in his depiction of the Philippines. He captures atmospheres, characteristics of the terrain, and esoteric cultural aspects with masterful authenticity. It’s not some fantasized, touristic picture, but ireality: over-worked caribou, monkey meat, pig’s blood, Tag-lish and children mistaking white men for priests. ( )