Imagery, details justify ‘Tree’
“Tree of Smoke”
by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 624 pages, $27)
Who needs another book about the Vietnam War this late in the game, with so many other national scars to pick at since then?
“Tree of Smoke” may be working over-familiar territory, but Denis Johnson has created something marvelous and new.
This sprawling epic, with its heated poetic language, confirms what we have suspected since Johnson’s 1992 collection of stories, “Jesus’ Son”: The man is quite simply one of our finest and most indispensable writers.
“Tree of Smoke” finds its center in Skip Sands, a spy-in-training who has gone to the Far East to fight the good fight against communism. His uncle and mentor is a hard-drinking, old-school CIA veteran known as the Colonel.
Interspersed in the main story is the tale of two brothers from Arizona, Bill and James Houston, aimless young men who sign up for the military because they can’t imagine anything else to do.
In the end, this war does what all wars do: It takes the best of intentions and crushes any remaining idealism with senseless violence, horror and lies. Johnson’s characters lose faith in god, country and themselves.
These are not new themes in the literature of war. But there are few writers who write so well about despair, sadness, loneliness and disillusionment.
Johnson’s soldiers wander around in dark villages and fight an invisible enemy. CIA agents work with double agents and assassins, but never know exactly why these schemes are set in motion.
Vietnam itself remains utterly unknowable to the Americans dropped unwittingly into its jungles.
“I mean you can come to a land where the fate of human beings is completely different from what you understood it to be. And this utterly different universe is administered through the earth itself,” the Colonel says.
But this is no ordinary war novel. The first battle scene doesn’t occur until a hundred pages in, and it has little to do with military strategy. It’s just a bunch of guys fighting and screaming in the dark.
After one battle, James Houston knows “he would never top this feeling, he was sure of it: scared, proud, lost, hidden, alive.”
Lost souls have always been Johnson’s forte. He’s never better than when he writes about drunks, drug addicts and prostitutes, people at the extremes and the margins of life. He writes drunk-talk – the disjointed and sentimental chatter of the wasted – better than anyone.
The greatest scene in “Tree of Smoke” may be its opening pages, when Bill Houston goes hunting and shoots a monkey “without really thinking about anything at all.” The monkey weeps before dying in his hands.
“He felt as if everything was all his fault, and with no one around to know about it, he let himself cry like a child,” writes Johnson. “He was eighteen years old.”
Ultimately, it’s that kind of surprising imagery that transcends the genre.
Johnson gathers details like a war correspondent, describing jungles and villages like someone who has seen them firsthand. But he ignites these details with a mystical fire and a poetic imagination.