Book review: ‘Tree of Smoke’

Tree of Smoke

by Denis Johnson

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

624 pages

Take everything you know about the American war in Vietnam. Take the two decades of cop shows where the protagonist was invariably a veteran haunted by the war, the echoes of America’s genocidal campaigns against its indigenous peoples, the thousands of songs written in opposition and support, the rumors of American POWs being held for slave labor that culminated in a failed incursion into Laos organized by Bo Gritz, William Shatner, Clint Eastwood, and President Ronald Reagan. Take all of that and add in the drugs, the fraggings, the bizarre PSYOP campaigns, and, lest we forget, the millions of dead Vietnamese – not to mention an entire country decimated by chemical defoliant, napalm, and more than a decade of high-intensity bombing campaigns. Then roll in Graham Green’s The Quiet American, Eugene Burdick and William Lederer’s The Ugly American, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, and H.Bruce’s Franklin’s Vietnam and Other American Fantasies.

If you can keep all that in mind, and if you can spare the brainpower for a study of the world’s inexhaustible capacity for mystery and suffering, and you can manage to read at the same time, you’ll be just about perfectly primed for Denis Johnson’s astounding novel, Tree of Smoke. It’s a hulking masterpiece, as unwieldy, contradictory, and, at times, blindingly nonsensical as the war itself. It is also, if you’re able to hang on for the ride, easily one of the finest novels of the twenty-first century.

Summarizing the plot seems about as useful as trying to herd cats, and the characters are almost too numerous to mention. The protagonist is one Skip Sands, a slightly intellectual and mildly naïve CIA operative, pulled into the Agency by his hard-drinking legend of an uncle, Colonel Sands. It’s pretty much Skip’s book, in that a good portion of it tracks his descent from idealistic spook to thoroughly disillusioned specter. But it’s Kathy Jones’ book, too. She’s a Canadian missionary and aid worker in Vietnam, and Skip Sands’ sometimes lover, who provides witness to the ramifications of the CIA’s chicanery. And we can’t forget Hao, the Vietnamese collaborator working for Colonel Sands. Nor his cousin, Trung, an NVA double-agent. And then there’s Bill Houston, who appears courtesy of Denis Johnson’s first novel, Angels, where he was the protagonist. And his little brother James, who goes from a green new recruit to a hardened acid-dropping LRRP over the course of the novel. And, then there’s my personal favorite, Jimmy Storm, a madman PSYOP dream-maker whom I won’t even try to summarize, instead offering this bit of dialogue:

While Storm tried to eat, Skip quizzed him in the Agency’s sweat-room style: let your man have a cigarette but ask him question so fast he can’t smoke it.

“Where are you from, Jimmy?”

“Carlyle County, Kentucky. Never going back.”

“Your name is B.S. Storm?”

“Correct. Billem Stafford Storm.”

“Billem?”

“B-I-L-L-E-M. It was my grandfather’s nickname. My mother’s father, William John Stafford. It doesn’t really solve the puzzle, man, it just puts in a crazy piece that doesn’t fit. You start out confused and end up mystified.”

“And they don’t call you Bill.”

“Nope.”

“Or Stormy.”

“Jimmy’s good. Jimmy gets you a response.”

Skip said, “Are you army Intelligence?”

“Psy Ops. Just like you. We want to turn those tunnels into a zone of psychological mental torture.”

“The tunnels?”

“The VC tunnels all over Cu Chin. I’m thinking: odorless, psychoactive substance. Scopolamine. LSD, man. Let it seep through the system. Those bastards would come swarming out of those holes with their brains revved way past the redline.”

“Gee.”

“Psy Ops is all about unusual thinking, man. We want ideas blown up right to where they’re gonna pop. We’re on the cutting edge of reality itself. Right where it turns into a dream.”

The novel whole novel reads like that, like a titanic pastiche of all its sources, but with rhythm all its own, illuminating not only the war, but also the incredible mythmaking surrounding it. One of the major subplots revolves around a paper proposal being developed by Colonel Sands about the dangers of cross-contamination in the intelligence world and the ways it can lead to insane policy decisions. It provides a wonderful critique of our latest foreign policy disasters, of course, but also, and more importantly to the novel, it gives us the task of trying to create a coherent narrative out of the disparate and dream-like sources that make up the story we tell ourselves about the Vietnam War. As does another of Colonel Sands’ pet projects: a number of boxes of index note cards on which he’s written something like the sum total of the all intelligence he’s gathered in his life, and which Skip Sands can find no way to organize to make them make sense.

All in all, one of the most impressive things about this colossal novel is that it seems to include not only everything that’s ever been said about the war, but everything that could be. And given all that seems to be at stake to America’s national mythology in the Vietnam War, it’s a breathtaking feat.

Ben Whitmer teaches at University of Colorado, Boulder.