Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17478 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-04
• Released on: 2007-09-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 624 pages

Amazon.com Review
Amazon Significant Seven, September 2007: Denis Johnson is one of those few great hopes of American writing, fully capable of pulling out a ground-changing masterpiece, as he did in 1992 with the now-legendary collection, Jesus' Son. Tree of Smoke showed every sign of being his "big book": 600+ pages, years in the making, with a grand subject (the Vietnam War). And in the reading it lives up to every promise. It's crowded with the desperate people, always short of salvation, who are Johnson's specialty, but despite every temptation of the Vietnam dreamscape it is relentlessly sober in its attention to on-the-ground details and the gradations of psychology. Not one of its 614 pages lacks a sentence or an observation that could set you back on your heels. This is the book Johnson fans have been waiting for--along with everybody else, whether they knew it or not. --Tom Nissley

From Publishers Weekly
If this novel, Johnson's first in nearly a decade, is-as the promo copy says-about Skip Sands, it's also about his uncle, a legendary CIA operative; Kathy Jones, a widowed, saintly Canadian nurse; 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 stories in Jesus' Son, novels like Resuscitation of a Hanged Man and Fiskadoro-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, and if Tree of Smoke has a flaw, it is that some characters are virtually indistinguishable. 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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by David Ignatius

To write a fat novel about the Vietnam War nearly 35 years after it ended is an act of literary bravado. To do so as brilliantly as Denis Johnson has in Tree of Smoke is positively a miracle.

This novel makes large demands on the reader: to submit to its length, to its disorienting language and structure, to the elusive and shattering experience of its characters, and finally to its sheer ambition to be definitive for the Vietnam generation. It is a presumptuous book, in other words, and you may will resist for the first several hundred pages. But it will grab you eventually, and get inside your head like the war it is describing — mystifying, horrifying, mesmerizing. Johnson, a poet, ex-junkie and adventure journalist, has written a book that by the end wraps around you as tightly as a jungle snake.

Johnson's story revolves around a CIA officer named William "Skip" Sands, who goes to Vietnam in 1967 as part of a team that is running deception operations against North Vietnam. His boss is his uncle, Col. Francis Xavier Sands, a legendary counter-insurgency warrior known to everyone as "the Colonel," and it is the Colonel who hovers over the book like a demon. He is meant to be a mythic character at the heart of darkness -- with a hint of the fictional Kurtz in Conrad's novel and echoes of the real-life Col. Edward Lansdale, the architect of counter-insurgency doctrine in Vietnam.

The black operation that Skip and the Colonel are running is known as "Tree of Smoke." As the novel unfolds, we discover that this may be an attempt to use a Vietnamese double agent to deceive Hanoi into believing that the United States is planning a diabolical attack against the North -- and that the "tree of smoke" may be a mushroom cloud. Johnson includes some interesting tradecraft about running double agents, who as Skip Sands observes, "carry two souls in one body." But the spy-novel machinations are just a subplot. The tree of smoke is the unreal landscape of the war itself.

Fans will recognize Johnson's voice most clearly in Cpl. James Houston and the other soldiers from Echo Recon Platoon, whose nightmarish experiences are woven throughout the book. They are magnificently drawn, their dialogue so sharp and desperate that you are certain this is how soldiers really talked in Vietnam in 1967. Johnson invents a language for them -- a kind of non-stop junkie patter that continues unbroken from the "Floor Show" whorehouse to Echo base camp to bloody battles in the jungle. Like the soldiers in Michael Herr's memoir, Dispatches, Houston becomes a "Lurp," running Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols, which puts him at the most extreme and brutal end of the war. And he loves it, re-ups for another tour, is despondent when he has to go home to Phoenix and become an ordinary loser again. He is addicted to Vietnam, you finally realize. He can't make it anymore in the ordinary world.

This is war as hallucination. It's a story of the decomposition and degradation of the characters and, by implication, Vietnam. A relief worker named Kathy Jones, who is in love with Skip and is in many ways the moral center of the book, warns him that in Vietnam he will ask himself, "When did I die? And why is God's punishment so cruel?" Several hundred pages later, the narrator says, "The life had worn her down," and we see and feel Kathy coming apart. But most of all we see Skip unraveling. He begins the book as an earnest young man who believes all the CIA briefing books; by the end he is a wild outcast running guns in Southeast Asia. "I quit working for the giant-size criminals," he says, "and started working for the medium size. Lousy hours and no fringe benefits, but the ethics are clearer."

The Vietnamese here are timeless, features of a landscape against which the American characters batter themselves senseless. "There's an old saying: The anvil outlasts the hammer," explains one Vietnamese character. "These folks mean business," avers the Colonel. "You whack them down in January, they're back all bright and shiny next May, ready for more of our terrible abuse." They take the beating America inflicts, but they seem impervious to it.

By the end of the book, the major characters are all broken by their versions of Vietnam addiction. "This place is Disneyland on acid," says Sgt. Jimmy Storm, a particularly sadistic operative who is convinced that the Colonel is on the ultimate deception mission when he is actually dead. Before Skip spins out of control, he offers this verdict: "This isn't a war. It's a disease. A plague." That is one of the most powerful themes of the book: Vietnam fed a national craving. We couldn't get out, we couldn't stay in; the war was controlling us rather than the other way around.

Johnson's skill in rendering the dialect of war was earned the hard way -- during the years in which he was, by his own account, a drug addict. He distilled that time in his celebrated collection of short stories, Jesus' Son. He told an interviewer from San Francisco Weekly several years ago that he still liked to go to support meetings and listen to other recovering addicts tell their stories: "I feel very privileged to hear how somebody used to run around stickin' people up and stealing cars, and now they're gettin' their life back together. . . . I just love the stories. The stories of the fallen world, they excite us. That's the interesting stuff." He has used that affinity to capture the rhythms of speech and the mental landscape of the enlisted men who did the fighting.

As a serious war novel, Tree of Smoke is implicitly a story about all wars. And a reader cannot travel this journey without thinking about America's current war in Iraq. Officers and politicians speak of the nobility of this war, as they do of all wars. But when you talk to soldiers in Baghdad or Anbar, you know that it is about surviving, counting down the days, believing in the people on your left and right rather than in the loftier mission statements that emanate from the Green Zone. And those are the lucky soldiers who stay sane. For the vulnerable ones, war takes away these human instincts of survival and replaces them with crazy ones. At the beginning of Tree of Smoke, Cpl. Houston admits that he's scared to death; by the end, he loves kicking other people and being kicked himself.

Something similar must have happened with the mercifully few U.S. soldiers who were involved in America's worst moments in Iraq -- at Abu Ghraib, Haditha and other places we will hear about later. They were damaged people -- addicted to war, feeding on it in a frenzy, being made crazy by it.

President Bush caused a stir not long ago when he said that Iraq was like Vietnam. An incontrovertible statement, surely: We can't get out of Iraq, we can't stay in; the Sunni insurgents who were our biggest enemies are now our best friends; the Shiites for whom we fought the war of liberation are now obstacles to reconciliation. It's a war turned upside down. If we could hear the inner voices of soldiers in Ramadi and Baqubah, behind those wraparound shades they would be thinking about coming home. The decent ones, that is. Those corrupted by war would want to stay on forever, as do Johnson's unforgettable, war-deranged cast of characters.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

not another vietnam novel
The book has some patches of good writing, and it does suck the reader in. However, one soon realizes that one is trapped in a swamp of shallow characters and murky events. The portrayal of the war seems to owe more to repeated watching of Apocalypse Now than any direct or original insights. The reality is much more weird and stunning than fiction, so you're better off reading histories and biographies.

Vietnam Collage
Tree of Smoke, Johnson's sprawling novel about Vietnam, is structured around the narratives of many characters, which include The Colonel, a hybrid of Colonel Kurtz and Lt. Colonel Bill Kilgore from Apocalypse Now (a dash of Hannibal from the A Team); Skip Sands, the Colonel's nephew and fellow CIA operative; Kathy Jones, a humanitarian worker from Canada; brothers Bill and James Houston; Lt Storm, an insane violent psychedelic dervish who supports The Colonel; and Vietnamese men Trung, a Buddhist Vietcong double agent, and How, a Saigon businessman working with the Americans.

TOS has many great things about it. As those familiar with Johnson's work will attest, the prose is electric - engaging, energetic, fresh. The characters of the Houston brothers and Skip Sands stand out as especially strong, distinct, and moving. Brothers James and Bill are the typical down and out, edge of respectable society guys that Johnson is so good at bringing to life. Skip Sands also comes across well. He is an introspective man, educated, morally conscious. His struggle is the struggle of the nation, full of good intentions and patriotism, faith in God, etc, which all come under fire when confronted with ludicrous nature of the war.

TOS's main weakness is it tries to accomplish too much with too many different points of view. The result is too much expository writing, too much generalization. Overall Johnson grapples with many themes - religion, patriotism, horror, innocence, death. These are big issues, better dealt with obliquely, through the specificity of characters and their situations. As a result of generalization, many of the characters feel flat. Colonel Sands is a complete stock character taken right out of a mediocre movie. Lt Storm speaks like a bad television movie - "this is getting psychedelic, man!" The Vietnamese characters are never fully penetrated, and feel as though they are placed in the novel to provide some sort of balance to the American perspective. Kathy Jones only comes alive at the very end of the novel.

I found the book worth reading all the way through. The total perspective on the Vietnam War is nothing new, and in no way compares to classics like Herr's "Dispatches" or most of Tim O'Brien's oeuvre. There is a directionless to the book that I found frustrating, but flashes of greatness as well.

One word of note, the plot definitely picks up at the end, and I found the last third by far the best - so keep reading.

Vietnam, receding in the rear-view mirror
"Tree of Smoke" is big, convoluted, and meant to be consumed whole in a long read, immersing the reader in the reflections of a fun-house mirror, the military's disintegrating role in Vietnam. There's a flood of imagery, an exhausting descriptive style that one appreciates or soon is overwhelmed by. In its 600 pages are characters that, true to the times, seem to be aimless, or at least helpless in the way of unfolding disaster.

Johnson has some heady company in writing about the watershed event of the 1960s, but at this remove from the events of 1963-1970 (the span of time covered in "Tree of Smoke") Vietnam is less a place of combat than a canvas to spread his cast of characters. Reviewers and many readers were dazzled by the novel's hallucinogenic tone ("whacked-out" was another positive accolade) in which plot is secondary to the effect of the author's spiraling prose.

Like many of its characters, the novel loses its way. The intent is to convey the undeniably chaotic forces at work in this unwinnable war; every man must find reasons for his survival, or work toward his redemption. Some find nothing but the heart of darkness. But survival or redemption requires a moral certainty, and here there is none. The characters only become more obscured in their jungle hell, and the Vietnam war oddly recedes from view as the novel progresses. The war remains central to the action, but as a refraction of the country's moral dilemma. For a novel with so much technical detail, which is considerable, Johnson manages to make Vietnam into a Hollywood abstraction.

Much has been written about the book's echoes of Graham Greene in "The Quiet American," his tale of Vietnam during the French colonial period of the 1950s, and the character of Skip Sands does share some of the optimistic idealism of that novel's Alden Pyle. Both men have their dreams turn dark as their idealism fades. But this is just one aspect of "Tree of Smoke," and the two books describe different eras. Greene's story revealed itself in its British reserve; Johnson's novel is overstuffed with meaning, and spins with centrifugal force, filled with characters we have a hard time knowing, or much caring about.

A big topic, a big book: reviewers and readers have given Johnson a large pass for this, but many of them may mistake the book's sheer weight for seriousness. Through the smoke and confusion we learn little about war or the human condition we don't already know, and of Vietnam even less.

For more about "Tree of Smoke," visit BellemeadeBooks at Blogger.com