Tree of Smoke: A Novel

The skinny: I loved Tree of Smoke, but I'm going to take some time this weekend to figure out more precisely why - this book fascinated and frustrated me. It's a very different type of Vietnam novel, focusing on the "secret war" instead of on the clash of arms, although there's that as well. But it's not verismo along the lines of The Things They Carried or psychedelic verismo a la Going After Cacciato - two great novels of Vietnam. Like ambitious Vietnam books, it speaks to broad topics on which it's hard to have an original thought. Yet Johnson succeeds and seems a wholly credible witness to the times and places he writes about so stylishly. For me, as good as his eye is and as intriguing as the Byzantine machinations of his characters, Johnson's brilliant dialogue carries the story - at at once tough, believable, and literary, and integral to the layering of Johnson's deep, organically wrought cast of Americans, Vietnamese, Brits, Germans, and others. (I frankly don't understand the fusillades he's drawn on both his dialogue and his characters.)Tree of Smoke struck me more than a few times as an odd Asian doppleganger-counterpart to Roth's American Pastoral - depicting "the War that Deranged the Americans," individually and in their clusters of society, both home and abroad, exposing all their tender nerves and mythologized beliefs. Johnson gives us more than a few Kurtz-like figures, and Conrad resonates throughout the descent of Skip Sands, "Johnny Storm," and others into various forms of call-it-what-you-will. Johnson's Houston brothers vault from SE Asia to invade/descend into Roth's American scene, although two-thirds a continent away from suburban New Jersey. I suppose this kind of thing - call it "madness as a metaphor" for short, but the book is so much more than that - are about as hackneyed in a Vietnam novel as anything else; after all, for many writers, soldiers, and civilians, Vietnam was the psychedelic war, and the psychotic war, and many other related things to many people. But in my reading, Johnson gives this new and plausible depth and dimensions. And he does so, I should add, with a ferocious sense of humor and with descriptive powers that are flat-out supernatural. On page 4, in which he spins out the fate of an unlucky higher jungle primate, we get an early display of Johnson's powers, a hint of his sensibility, and a sense of how this may all play out.I've docked the book a star for its threadbare "Ah....the nefarious CIA devours its own" theme that so many writers are drawn to. Democracies have a hard time with secret organizations, and democratic peoples spin yarns - delirious imaginings, conspiracies, short stories, novels, editorials, and such - about anything they can't peer into as deeply as they wish; I'm more than a little tired of this, and I apologize for a pet peeve. (If having said as much seems a spoiler, it will be one for only the most obtuse of readers, to include anyone who takes on the book without first having read the dust jacket or the cover of the paperback.)But in the end, a lot of readers - as we can see from the reviews of those who were less impressed with the book than I was - will wonder about what Johnson has left us with. For so protean a novel, each of us will decide for ourselves. I'd like to ponder it a bit more. It's (obviously) not a book for everyone. It's talky. It takes its own sweet time. It's extremely calculated in its ambiguities. Readers who are not of Johnson's generation, who weren't devouring newspapers in the 1960s and 1970s, or who were never in uniform, may view much of this novel as obscure or pedantic. But Johnson ties things up pretty well by page 614, and Tree of Smoke gripped me, hard. To me, it created a literary world well worth inhabiting, and it made me want to read a great deal more Denis Johnson.

TREE OF SMOKE revolves around Colonel Francis X. Sands, a civilian operative for the CIA who has his own base and his own recon contingent and even his own helicopter. The Colonel is a renegade of sorts and he soon gets himself in Dutch with the higher ups in the CIA. His troubles begin when he writes an article for the CIA publication outlining the differences between intelligence and analysis. Intelligence officers collect the data but their superiors may misinterpret it for political reasons or for their own personal advancement. The Colonel is an alcoholic and really can't articulate what he wants to say so he has another man translate his ideas. This man turns him in to his superiors. Matters go further south when the CIA murders a Catholic priest in the Philippines who was mistakenly rumored to have been providing arms to Moslem revolutionaries.If there is a main character in the story it's "Skip" Sands, the Colonel's nephew, also a CIA operative whom the colonel seems to be protecting. He is given out of the way assignments and his main job seems to be to type and organize the Colonel's interview files. While in the Philippines he witnesses the murder of the priest and also has an affair with Kathy Jones, a Canadian missionary whose husband Timothy has been murdered by the rebels. The story moves from 1963 just after Kennedy's assassination to 1983.In 1969 the Colonel is "running" a double agent named Trung, of the Vietcong; the other CIA agents are highly suspicious because of the Colonel's idea to try to make the North Vietnamese believe that some renegade CIA agents want to plant an atom bomb in Hanoi harbor. They think he just might do it.There are also two brothers, William and James Houston. William is in the Navy and seventeen-year-old James joins the Army, where he becomes a LURP or tunnel rat, special operatives who go down in the Vietcong tunnels, often high on speed, to ferret out Charlie. Both of these guys are seriously messed up, but they just might be the most interesting characters in the book. Both get in bar fights and have little respect for women, even their own mother, a religious fanatic. Both do prison time. At one point William Houston wonders when some disaster will come along and push him into making something of himself. He's twenty-six at the time.TREE OF SMOKE carries on the modern tradition of parading as many viewpoint characters on stage as possible. There are the two Sands, there're the Houston brothers, there is Kathy Jones, there's Trung and a South Vietnamese businessman named Hao who is just trying to stay alive and wind up on the right side; there's also Ming, the colonel's helicopter pilot, and Jimmy Storm, a sort of aide de camp to the colonel, who is definitely a CATCH-22 character. Towards the end of the book he goes looking for the mysterious colonel who's supposed to be dead. The colonel has a mysterious element that will remind you of Kurtz in HEART OF DARKNESS.Have patience with this one. Don't listen to the people who flunked the marshmallow test; it's a decent comment on the Vietnam war without a whole lot of battle scenes; it also includes some subtle and not so subtle tie-ins with our modern quagmire.

‘Tree of Smoke’ is rich in ideas and beguilingly poetic but, alas, the novel is far too long. One reviewer suggested that the best way to handle the length is to luxuriate in the book’s qualities, like soaking in a hot bath. I tried that and it didn’t work. Its labyrinthine plot (is there even a plot?) became irritating, the constant shuffling between one character or group and a completely different one frustrating. A commendably ambitious attempt to tackle the Vietnam war in fiction but for me it just became tedious.

Very physically difficult to read at 614 pages. To actually keep it open through a chapter wasWearing. However, the characters were very well drawn, I certainly felt I was among very differentbut interesting people. A lot of it just goes over your head unless you have a detailed knowledgeof Vietnam. Details of the war - zero - but then again that about sums it up. A real phsyco op -but a colossal US disaster - for itself yes - but unforgivable for the death, maiming and burning of thecountry and it's people!

Why has nobody ever written a novel of note about Vietnam? Could it be because there is no way to simplify the details of a war which America lost? No way, especially after the Mai Lai massacre, to romanticise it into a moral victory if not an actual one? Men who served in Vietnam came home to a country that was divided along `peace' or `war' lines. The climate of opinion turned against Kissinger's war of attrition that set targets for body-counts, without specifying whether these were combatants, or merely men, women and children. Consequently, the men who fought in Vietnam had only a story of shame to tell and perhaps it is understandable that no one wanted to tell it.Another reason might be, perhaps, because the film-makers got there before the writers? Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Platoon, did these films say it all? Now Denis Johnson has written the definitive Vietnam novel by which all others will be judged.It is far from a perfect novel - written in episodes following a large number of characters, it is not something I found myself able to read straight through. This is not to say that it is not engaging. In some sections it is chiefly that the complexity of these people's stories does not make for gripping plots. Johnson's ambition for this book is evident in his refusal to make this a story about the North or South Vietnamese, a story about soldiers, or missionaries, or a story about nurses, or whores, or religious differences, or the CIA, or the people back home in the good old U.S of A. Instead it is all of these stories, interwoven, cut into sections, made mythic, made comic or touching, made shockingly raw, or made into a tree of smoke (a wonderful term that signals the ineffable, ungraspable contradictions of this new kind of warfare, not as recognisable as a mushroom cloud, if similar in shape).Not, then, an easy book to read, but very often gripping, heart-breaking, sometimes shocking, puzzling or even annoying, but always tremendously affecting, intriguing and ultimately tragic.

a great new read - thanks for speedy delivery

A somewhat rambling book but it rarely failed to hold one's interest. Lyrical writing in stark with the mayhem it portrays; the protagonists capture the futility of the Vietnam war.