War without end

Best known for his tales of losers, thieves and addicts, Denis Johnson takes on the Vietnam War in his daring new novel, "Tree of Smoke."

By Laura Miller

Read more: Fiction, War, Books, Laura Miller, Vietnam War, Reviews, Denis Johnson, Novels, Book reviews

Sept. 17, 2007 | Once upon a time, Denis Johnson published a collection of stories called "Jesus' Son," flinty shards of lowlife illuminated by the phosphorous glow of the author's despairing faith or faith in despair (it's often hard to tell which). "Jesus' Son" turned out to be unforgettable, which hasn't always worked to Johnson's advantage. Knowing and loving those stories has made it difficult for lazy readers to grasp what Johnson has accomplished since. His widely misunderstood and woefully underappreciated novel "Already Dead" is a symphony of malevolence and chaos harnessed to a baroque but exquisitely executed plot. Many critics, apparently flummoxed by Johnson's abrupt shift from minimalism to maximalism, missed the underlying pattern and declared the book a big mess.

Johnson's latest novel, "Tree of Smoke," is the same kind of beast. It has a better chance of being taken seriously than "Already Dead" because the latter book was set in the drug culture of coastal Northern California while "Tree of Smoke" takes place during the Vietnam War. If you're going to be as formally daring as Johnson is here, it helps to throw the acolytes of received wisdom a bone they can get their jaws around; 'Nam, man, we all know that's heavy. The novel, however, isn't really about war, or not quite. Like a lot of Johnson's work, it's about belief, specifically about the clash between religion and myth. More specifically yet, it's about what happens when people who think in a straight line collide with a universe that goes in circles.

Johnson's two main characters are young American men. One, Skip Sands, is a CIA officer cutting his teeth in Southeast Asia, and the other is James Houston (the brother of a character from another Johnson novel), an aimless working-class kid transformed by the war into a feral monster. The loose bond connecting them is Col. Francis X. Sands, Skip's uncle and boss, known to most of the characters simply as the colonel. A legendary World War II hero and charismatic personality, the colonel has commandeered an entire infantry platoon to run an obscure reconnaissance base in a back corner of South Vietnam. Their project has something to do with mapping tunnels (although not much of that goes on) and he calls it "Labyrinth." He reigns over this fiefdom in spite of the fact that he's not actually in the military anymore. "If it wasn't for last Tet," a marveling enemy observes, "by now he'd probably have his own brigade."

The colonel puts Skip in charge of a far less thrilling task: duplicating and cross-referencing a set of 19,000 index cards filled with intelligence about the region. Stashed away in a villa once owned by a suicidal French doctor, sifting through two footlockers stuffed with this rapidly aging information, Skip feels himself to be exiled from the action. James, detailed to the colonel's platoon, would be restless, too, were it not for the cornucopia of purchasable sex available in town. The characters spend the first half of the book impatiently waiting for their war to start, and the last half wishing it would end, until they finally realize that, for them, it never will.

In the middle comes the Tet Offensive, including a bravura combat sequence when the platoon finally comes under attack. At the dead center of the book is a scene in which nearly all of the characters are present to witness a half-mad American "Lurp" (Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol) torture a captured Viet Cong guerrilla until the colonel intervenes and shoots the victim. This is the hinge of the novel, its heart of darkness, and the rest of the story's events radiate from that point, forward and backward in time, with an impressive symmetry. Important images -- monkeys, mazes, eggs -- and events mirror each other at points equidistant from that center.

This is the unconventional structure of "Tree of Smoke," as audacious as one of the colonel's schemes, and yet so far largely unnoticed by its reviewers. Jim Lewis, in the New York Times Book Review, seems most interested in favorably comparing Johnson's press campaign with those of other (unnamed) novelists he regards as spotlight whores, and Michiko Kakutani dull-wittedly remarks that "plotting has never been one of [Johnson's] strengths." Yet the plotting of "Tree of Smoke" is exactly what makes it exceptional among Vietnam novels.

The formal inventiveness of Johnson's recent work gets missed partly because many readers still associate him with bleak, simple tales of losers, thieves, addicts and drunks; perhaps they expect the author to be as disorganized as his subjects. It has also become standard to complain that long, complicated American "social" novels are brilliant but "baggy" and wayward; this can be passed off as critical acumen if you're not sure what an author is really up to. But, above all, it is difficult to recognize the experimentalism in Johnson's novels as such because unlike most experimental fiction, they are not dull. Johnson never signals his readers that he's about to deliver a dose of highbrow medicine, and so you can swallow it along with all the blood and guts, the spy stuff, the profane GI repartee, the honky-tonk debacles, the harrowing battle scenes and so on, and never know what hit you.

You can feel the effects, though, and so Kakutani, while entirely missing the point of "Tree of Smoke," wonders over Johnson's ability to "take these derivative elements and turn them into something highly original -- and potent." "Derivative" is not the half of it. Scenes, characters, motifs and incidents in "Tree of Smoke" have been freely borrowed not only from "Heart of Darkness," but also from "A Passage to India" and "The Quiet American," as well as every Vietnam movie ever made, but especially "Apocalypse Now" and "Platoon."

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