LA Weekly

Early in Denis Johnson’s new novel, Tree of Smoke, William “Skip” Sands, an idealistic young American CIA agent in Vietnam, is stationed in a villa near the infamous Cu Chi tunnels. The villa’s previous owner, a French physician, had become increasingly obsessed with caves and labyrinths until finally he crawled down into an abandoned section of tunnels and disappeared forever. This, in miniature, embodies the experiences of almost all the characters in the novel — they are drawn into the maze of Vietnam and either die, disappear or lose their way. It is also a metaphor for the act of reading the novel itself. The twisting thread of plot constantly teases the reader with a sense of purpose and direction — it is rife with plans, skirmishes, conspiracies, signs, visions, double agents and double crosses — but ultimately, after 614 pages, it leaves us, like its characters, bewildered and devastated.

Tree of Smoke teems with characters and storylines, but at its center is a Kurtz-like figure, Skip’s uncle, an iconoclastic CIA agent known as “the Colonel.” He has grand plans to defeat the communists using a psychological operation known as the “tree of smoke” — a plot involving a nonexistent nuclear weapon and a Viet Cong double agent. In the end, however, he is betrayed and disappears, possibly murdered either by the Viet Cong or by his own CIA handlers. In the years after the war, the Colonel’s right-hand man, Jimmy Storm, spends years obsessively following rumors that the Colonel is still alive, madly hoping that the “tree of smoke” operation is still in action. As for Skip, he becomes a notorious gunrunner in the Philippines, his principles and hope undermined completely. In a parallel story line, the brothers James and Bill Houston undergo a trial of fire in the war, and return to the United States as damaged souls — those who have read Johnson’s first novel, the near-perfect Angels, know the bloody end that awaits them.

One does not read Johnson’s fiction for narrative clarity — the joy of this book lies in its meandering and tangents, in its lacerating details and hallucinatory wonder, its unexpected twists and dead ends, its richness, strangeness, shadows and sudden, devastating beauty. A reoccurring concept comes from the Book of Corinthians: “And there are differences of administration, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operation, but it is the same God which worketh all in all.” Tree of Smoke clearly operates under this philosophy: The path to truth is not a singular one. The novel’s internal logic and the texture of the prose are in constant flux; the ground constantly shifts beneath our feet.

Johnson’s story is crowded with characters, as he elegantly slides from one perspective — and one reality — to another. One moment we’re with wide-eyed virgin soldiers watching a whore smoke cigarettes with her vagina. Then we’re inside the mind of a missionary widow contemplating the unforgiving dictates of Calvinism. Then we’re drinking whiskey with CIA agents as they scheme and debate political theory. A Catholic priest gives a rambling sermon to a church filled with people who don’t speak English, a cheerful Vietnamese doctor dances with a crazy beggar woman after successfully amputating a soldier’s leg, a group of villagers gleefully hunts a snake. It is a book that contains multitudes: gritty realism and nightmarish visions, minimalism and maximalism, an intoxicating blend of Tim O’Brien, John le Carré, Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad, the Upanishads and the Bible.


Johnson has always been a writer fascinated with religion in its many guises. His characters — flawed, sinful, starved and drifting — are ravenous for moments of transcendence and clarity. Like the writers of the Bible itself, Johnson is masterful at crafting an atmosphere of profound mystery, pierced at times by blinding illumination. The novel’s title itself is taken from a passage in the Book of Joel: “And I will give portents in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and palm trees of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.” The description is horrifying as well as thrilling — awful in both senses of the word. This is the quality that Johnson strives for — I know of no writer better than him at holding heaven and hell in a single sentence.

As the Tet Offensive begins, a missionary widow listens from a distance: “A storm she thought. God with his big white thoughts... By dawn things had settled down. The cicadas started, and a slow sweet light saturated the atmosphere. A gibbon called down over the treetops. You’d think there wasn’t a gun in the world. A small rooster came and stood in the doorway, raised its beak, and crowed with its eyes closed. You’d think it was Peace on Earth.” While wandering the streets of Saigon, Skip sees a drunken man stopping a bus in the street: “Skip stood and watched: the bloody face, deformed by passion, shining in the bus’s headlights; the head back, the arms limp, as if the man hung by hooks in his armpits. This reeking desperate city. It filled him with joy.”

This is the brilliance of Johnson’s writing: He understands human suffering better than almost anyone, but he gropes behind the veil of tears to find the glory beyond. Some novels find their inspiration in psychology, some in sociology, some in philosophy — Johnson has always been a writer of “sacred” literary texts, books that tap into the infinitely recurring stories of humanity, stories like the sacrifice of Isaac or the stealing of Persephone by Hades.Tree of Smoke should be considered the literary bible of the Vietnam War — and perhaps the bible of war itself.


TREE OF SMOKE | By DENIS JOHNSON | FSG | 614 pages | $27 hardcover