Tree of Smoke

I've worked my way through the ninth book on the New York Times Ten Best of 2007, Tree of Smoke, a novel by Denis Johnson. This is a long, dense book, with a brilliant use of language. However at times I found myself lost in the thicket of prose, unsure what was going on or who was who. I suspect this is more my fault than the author, as it is work that requires some attention to detail.

The subject, as a whole, is the Vietnam War. There are two sets of major characters: the Houston brothers, Bill and James, who are lowly grunts. Bill never goes to 'Nam, he is stationed in the Philippines and gets sent back home just as brother enters the war. Back home in Arizona he drifts from job to job and into prison. James sees action at the Tet offensive, and here the writing recalls many military films like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, with zippy jargon and acronyms and the characters are known by nicknames or character traits (one refuses to be called anything but Black Man, while Johnson refers to a few others as the Screwy Loot or the Cherry Loot, sort of an homage to Catch-22).

The other main characters are Skip Sands, a CIA agent, and his uncle, known most often as simply the Colonel, even though he is a civilian. The Colonel is a Kurtz-like character, a larger-than-life man who worships Knute Rockne and is running his own intelligence scheme in country. There's also a missionary's wife who has a passionless affair with Skip, a few Vietnamese agents (one from the north, one from the south) and a German assassin thrown into the mix.

From the opening chapter, which details Bill shooting and killing a monkey, it's apparent that Johnson is a masterful writer. At times, though, the story threatens to blow apart at the seams. There's a certain hopelessness that pervades the work. A book that starts with an eighteen-year-old soldier shooting a monkey doesn't get any happier six-hundred pages later.

What strikes me most about this novel is the comparison of the U.S. experience between World War II and Vietnam. The Colonel straddles this divide, as he was a pilot in the Flying Tigers and later was a POW who made a spectacular escape. To paraphrase a remark once made about the comparison between Watergate and the Iran-Contra Affair, World War II is something that seems to have been written by Shakespeare, while Vietnam is more like Beckett.