Tree of Smoke

Denis Johnson’s eighth novel, Tree of Smoke, is a tour de force—squared. Twenty-five years in the making and weighing in at 614 pages, it deserves all the phrases of praise that typically adorn the covers of literary masterpieces. If you think you’ve read all you need to about the Vietnam War, take a deep breath and re-up.

Set in Southeast Asia, Tree of Smoke begins in 1963 following the assassination of President Kennedy and ends two decades later. Its main protagonist is William “Skip” Sands, a sheltered Midwesterner who joins the Central Intelligence Agency intent on becoming the protégé of his legendary and charismatic uncle, Colonel Sands, a member of the CIA old guard. Skip is initiated into the world of covert operations in Manila, but can’t wait to get to Saigon. As Johnson writes, “This reeking desperate city. It filled him with joy.” Shortly after arriving there, and much to his disappointment, Skip is shuffled off to a comfortable villa, complete with a cook, and given the banal task of sorting through the Colonel’s archive of index cards. It’s in that material where Skip finds biblical references to a Tree of Smoke, possibly nothing more than his alcoholic uncle’s ruminations on warfare.

We also get to know Kathy Jones, a nurse from Canada who has come to the Philippines with her missionary husband. After Jones’s husband disappears, she has a short, pathetic affair with Skip. Eventually she ends up in Vietnam as an aid worker and develops sympathies that run counter to Skip’s establishment views.

As if that weren’t enough, Johnson also dives into the story of two sailor brothers, Bill and James Houston, grunts and fuckoffs who come from less fortunate circumstances than Skip. Fans will recognize Bill Houston as the criminal drifter from Johnson’s first novel, Angels (1983). All these years later, we get Houston’s backstory. Though you don’t have to be familiar with Johnson’s earlier work to care about these brothers, for those who are, it’s a welcome bonus.

Johnson has a particular way of presenting the worlds of losers and outcasts with humanity. With his usual sympathy for people who fall off the grid, he presents the plight of so many war veterans. Here we see Houston’s first murder as a scared 18-year-old far from home—he kills a monkey in the jungle and weeps maybe for the first and last time.

Tree of Smoke is a work of fiction, but like his acclaimed collection of short stories Jesus’ Son (1992), which was informed by Johnson’s own issues with drugs, this novel gets a boost from the author’s bio. Johnson, whose father worked for the State Department, spent his childhood in the Philippines.

For the last five years, it seemed as though Johnson had lost interest in fiction on the page. He’d begun publishing plays, and found a home in Chicago theater at the Viaduct, where he was the house company’s in-house playwright, churning out scripts with titles like Hellhound on My Trail and Shoppers Carried by Escalators Into the Flames. From poet to novelist to short-story writer to playwright, Johnson has become something of a chameleon. But Tree of Smoke, incorporating all of those guises,has to be seen as his master achievement.

Tree of Smoke is out now.