Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11745 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
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's Book World/washingtonpost.com
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

might not cook your goose
I listened to a narration of this book on 18 CDs. Sometimes I was cooking, eating, or sleeping. Much of what I could say about plot details that I do remember would be out of place for those who don't want to know why their goose is already cookied before they even start reading this book. My timing on the CDs was designed to allow a return to the library in Saint Paul before it fills with peoploe who think of coming to Saint Paul like going to church.

My most recent book purchase, Selected Writings of Sarah Kofman, with its emphasis on conjuring death, has a topic heading at the top of page 132 about Saint Paul, The Law as Hateful. Based on ideas that Nietzsche published in his book Daybreak, it makes Christianity seem like a religion that was created primarily for people who did not want to think that their goose was cooked. One of the characters in "Tree of Smoke" comes to Saint Paul, Minnesota, near the end of the book. On a scale from stillborn to born with a brain, her trip to Saint Paul is like having her brain fall into a fish net. She might be considered a sex object at the beginning of the book, but at some point, she becomes the personification of a "Don't look now" mentality.

It is quite common for us to consider religion less frightening than a myth in the P. I. in which the world of suck joins the world of blood in the form of a vampire. "Tree of Smoke" tries to explain how such myths became a basis of Psy Ops. A big irony is that the same American agency that needs double agents to do big Psy Ops activities was also attempting to get rid of double agents, or anyone who seemed capable of being on both sides. Talking about a thing as a hypothetical becomes hyperbolic when a polygraph test attempts to cover the same material. I have become so fond of sacrilege this summer, mixing the standard religious mythology with historical hypotheticals that are more plausible than certain assertions in the Bible, I feel like jumping from the basic palm tree, which is not the world the Hebrew Bible used for a pillar of cloud, to a real empire that was based in Rome for centuries:

Rose (a name shortened from something that looked Jewish to me) wrote a book, Revolutionary Antisemitism from Kant to Wagner (Princeton University Press, 1990), which mentioned Germans around 1800 who considered Jesus the son of a Roman soldier. The historicism connected with the idea mentioned Greek and Latin as languages that the Talmud had been translated into, resulting in some confusion about Jews referring to the "son of the virgin." Considering the Roman empire as a real empire, as Japanese expansion in a prosperity sphere in Asia before America joined World War II involved comfort women, it seems plausible that Mary could have been a sex object for a string of Roman soldiers.

Like alcohol, tobacco, and firearms in Tree of Smoke, sex can be part of a metaforeplay that has after-effects greater than a bunch of Branch Davidians becoming smoke and toast fifteen years ago near Waco, Texas. Iraq was not like Nam because we really wanted to declare victory and fire their army before 4000 American troops could be killed in Iraq. Tree of Smoke attempts to turn alcohol, tobacco, and firearms into the ultimate pleasures of this life, but ultimately it runs into the question: do you enjoy telling lies?

What's Your Poison?
Denis Johnson's novel is a rich, mysterious and lyrical success, but it also happens to be about war, and this creates a few problems.

How one feels about war being used as a philosophical or literary metaphor will most likely inform his or her overall feeling about Tree of Smoke. Rather than a raw look at warfare on the ground, this novel's eye intentionally hovers slightly above the fray.

The central protaganist, a young CIA agent named Skip, works in the world of Psychological Operations, and after witnessing some dirty dealings in the Phillipines, he wins his longed for assignment to Vietnam.

While there he works with his Uncle, a Colonel who is being surveilled by his own Agency for having written a wierd manifesto/memo about his ideas covert warfare. The Colonel is into deep psychological and intelligence tactics and strategies He is a brilliant man, but at the same time it would appear that he is growing frighteningly metaphysical and mystical.

The Colonel casts a large shadow over his nephew, and also the novel itself. Cut from the same cloth as Conrad's Kurtz and Melville's Ahab, he is a cipher with a very determined will to win what is an unwinnable situation.

While Skip wonders about his Uncle's sanity, double agents, biblical and mythological references, and internal affairs-type investigations are layered on until Johnson succeeds, (at least in my opinion,) in creating a very mysterious atmosphere. However, the book DOES sometimes cross that line between mysterious and confusing, and I found myself going back to reread some passages to make sure I was tracking.

There are other major characters; two brothers who are fighting the war as enlisted men in different branches of the service. At first their presence is a nice juxtaposition to the CIA entities. But as the book progresses, their fractured incidents, (both stateside and in country,) began to feel superfluous. It was as if they should be in a collection of short stories, separate from this work.

About a third of the way into the novel there is a very tense narrative of a firefight during the Tet Offensive. It is a surprise attack and it is the first combat some of the characters are ever seeing. The suspense, anxiety and confusion of the attack are relayed in a gripping manner, and this brings home a visceral connection with the overall themes. At this point I thought the novel was going to strike a nice balance between the loft of its mythological/literary metaphors and the realism of the violent war that consumed so much of our nation's blood and treasure.

That structure never quite coheres or sustains itself, but despite that, I feel the book still remains an achievement. Large, rambling and labrynthine it is a challenging read with many enduring moments.


And I should note that it seems as if the Iraq War informs this novel as much, if not more so, than the Vietnam War. And so I can imagine Tree of Smoke will be able to speak to some in future generations who will find their nation engaged in protracted conflicts.

A Lot of Dead Wood
The initial pages of this book sucked me in. The scene with the monkey dying in the soldiers hands is brilliant. Unfortunately, passages of the same or similar qualities are few and far between. For me, there were too many lengthy periods where nothing much seemed to be going on. These would be followed by brief passages that were fascinating and full of energy. I wonder if this book is to the Vietnam War what "Barney Miller" was to TV cop shows. By that I mean, there's not a lot of actual war in this war novel. It's more about how people process and deal with the fact of being involved in a war than it is about combat.

I think Johnson is an excellent writer. But there's a lot of slogging through some boring and at times confusing events to get to occasional flashes of brilliance. Tree of Smoke is too long but it is memorable if you can get to the end.