Denis Johnson writes in just about every genre possible: novels, short stories, poetry, plays and journalism. What's more, he writes well in all of them.

His style is lean and laconic, deceptively simple but capable of short, hard jabs that come out of nowhere, sucker punches sometimes dangerously below the belt. Maybe that's the poet in him, for he's a fine poet, a kind of counterpoint to Billy Collins' uplift. His dark, brutal lyric often sounds like Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway boiled down to the existential core of our worst moments of fear, loneliness and uncontrollable desires.

So. Life ain't pretty. What's new?

For Johnson, what's new is something old: Vietnam.

Tree of Smoke, the author's seventh novel and his first in seven years, is what's often called in the book industry a big, sprawling novel. It's packed with adventure and bigger-than-life characters - and a lot more besides.

Set mainly in the Philippines and Vietnam, the story is primarily an examination of the disparity between myth and reality in the day-to-day lives of two men, William "Skip" Sands and his uncle, Col. Francis Xavier Sands.

The Colonel is a World War II veteran and, as a shadowy CIA operative, has been involved in various anti-communist and counterinsurgency campaigns in Southeast Asia for two decades. It is 1965 when we meet him, and the Colonel wears a "silver crew cut on a head like an anvil. He was at the moment drunk and held upright by the power of his own history: football for Knute Rockne at Notre Dame, missions for the Flying Tigers in Burma, anti-guerrilla operations here in this jungle (in the Philippines) with Edward Lansdale, and, more lately, in South Vietnam. And he'd fought the Malay Tigers, and the Pathet Lao; he'd faced enemies on many Asian fronts. Skip loved him . . . "

For the Colonel, war is something more than a mission, something more, even, than winning. The Colonel tells a companion that "War is 90 percent myth. . . . In order to prosecute our own wars we raise them to the level of human sacrifice, don't we, and we constantly invoke our God. It's got to be about something bigger than dying, or we'd all turn deserter."

Now, as the conflict in Vietnam heats up, the Colonel is basically running "Psy Ops for MAC-V" (Psychological Operations Group of the Military Assistance Command - Vietnam). His nephew, Skip, has been recruited by the CIA, and the elder Sands has pulled strings to get his nephew under his wing in Psy Ops. (Skip's father, the Colonel's brother, died in WWII.)

Skip is assigned to "Tree of Smoke," a convoluted counterintelligence plan involving a double agent the Colonel has set in motion to feed false information to the Viet Cong. The danger, as Johnson makes clear, is that "intelligence" breaks apart in a hall of mirrors, and soon no one knows who is speaking the truth and who is not.

The younger Sands is defined by his nickname: "Skip." He is weak and passive, his intelligence and competence undercut by indecisiveness and a crippling sense of inadequacy. He had been raised by his mother and his mother's relatives in a small town in Kansas: "It was a loud, sad family" and somehow Skip never really grew up. Encountering the Colonel and the tough, hard-bitten men who serve with him, it becomes clear that Skip has "entered their world without becoming a man."

Skip is eager to enter that world, though, hoping to find the same sense of purpose and belief that his uncle professes, indeed, positively radiates. The narrative then is Skip's education, his initiation into "War" - uppercase and in quotes.

What he learns often remains obscure and difficult to follow in Johnson's complex, chaotic twists and turns of plot. But one thing is clear: war - lowercase and no quotes - is not "myth"; it is raw, ugly, morally complex, dangerous, degrading and, all too often, fatal - but without really ending anything but lives.

Skip, who longs to be "shoved into the forge . . . where theories burned to cinders," will find, by book's end, that it is he who will hang from the Tree of Smoke, as much a victim of the myth of war as if he'd died on the battlefield.

Of the many strengths of this novel, two stand out. First is Johnson's command of detail and description. For more than 600 pages, the author drops us into scene after scene rendered with a power and clarity that will leave readers breathless.

Consider how Johnson sinks his hooks in here: "The Screwy Loot took a squad on patrol, and the first thing his bad luck did for them was to run them across a spider-hole with two dead VC down in it. Screwy found it all by himself when, leaving the trail to get around a fallen tree, he plunged his foot through the thatch and onto the head of a corpse."

I dare you to hit a couple of sentences like that and not finish the chapter. I couldn't.

The second strength is dialogue. Johnson's is in a class with Hemingway and Robert Stone: not just by turns tough or funny or brutal or sad, but talk that sometimes seems to evoke and echo everything you've already read in the book, deepening the shadows cast by characters and events you thought were buried a few chapters back. The fact that much of the talk is obscene may risk giving offense but carries a weight of verisimilitude hard to deny.

Finally, though, it is the theme of the book that makes it an important and substantial read. Vietnam was a long time ago, but we are still trying to sort reality from myth.

Thirty or more years later, grown men still stand at the Wall in Washington, raise a hand and trace the names of the dead cut in black marble. And weep. Tree of Smoke helps us to understand how those names got there.

About the author

• Johnson is perhaps best known for his 1992 Jesus' Son, a collection of 11 stories of life in a decayed America where sex, drugs, drifting and violence are detailed in a chilling anthropology of addiction. The book was turned into a film of the same name in 1999 and remains a cult favorite.

Tree of Smoke

• By Denis Johnson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 624 pages, $27.

• Grade: A

Duane Davis is a freelance writer living in Littleton.

Back to Top