Denis Johnson's wildly ambitious new novel, Tree of Smoke, reads like a whacked-out, hallucinogenic variation on such whacked-out, hallucinogenic Vietnam classics as Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Michael Herr's Dispatches, Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers and Stephen Wright's Meditations in Green. It features a central character who comes to see himself as a combination of the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and another who comes across as a latter-day version of Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
What's amazing is that Johnson somehow manages to take these derivative elements and turn them into something highly original - and potent. Though Tree of Smoke is hobbled by a plot that starts and stops and lurches wildly about, it's a powerful story about the American experience in Vietnam, with unsettling echoes of the current American experience in Iraq. It is a story about bad intelligence and military screw-ups and people who have lost their way, a story like so many of Johnson's earlier novels, about Americans in purgatory, waiting impatiently, even expectantly, for the coming apocalypse.
This has been Johnson's preoccupation throughout his career, from early, incantatory books like Angels and Fiskadoro through later, tendentious works like Already Dead. Whether the backdrop is a futuristic US (Fiskadoro), Nicaragua in the 1980s (The Stars at Noon), or, in the case of this latest novel, Vietnam in the 1960s, he has consistently promoted a vision of the US as a country in the grip of misplaced dreams and outright delusions, intent on exporting its madness abroad. His cast of characters, too, is similar from book to book: an alarming spectrum of madmen and deadbeats and drifters - the lost, the damned and the dispossessed - all yearning for salvation or release.
In Tree of Smoke, Skip Sands initially seems like a very different sort of Johnsonian hero. Skip is young, naive and eager to prove himself as a CIA operative. He is convinced that the US is going to defeat the Communists in Vietnam and wants to be there for that victory. And he hopes to emulate his larger-than-life uncle, Colonel Francis Sands, a Flying Tiger who escaped from the Japanese during World War II and made a swaggering legend of himself.
Most of all, Skip believes in the goodness and promise of the US with boyish innocence and ardor: "In the Stars and Stripes," Johnson writes, "all the passions of his life coalesced to produce the ache with which he loved the United States of America - with which he loved the dirty, plain, honest faces of GIs in the photographs of World War II, with which he loved the sheets of rain rippling across the green playing field toward the end of the school year, with which he cherished the sense-memories of the summers of his childhood."
Skip's innocence, however, is tarnished when he witnesses the agency's brutal assassination of a priest (falsely suspected of running guns) in the Philippines, and in Vietnam he quickly becomes lost in the wilderness of mirrors created by his fellow intelligence officers. He is drawn willy-nilly into a complicated plot involving a double agent - a Vietcong sympathizer, who apparently agrees to carry out a mission for the Americans - and finds himself increasingly unable to distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys, the earnest and the duplicitous, the idealistic and the mercenary.
As for Skip's mentor, the colonel, he too loses his way or, rather, comes to believe that his superiors have lost their way. In a secret memo he suggests that the intelligence functions of the agency are being perverted, that they are being used to "provide rationalizations for policy," much the way flawed intelligence was used, in the walk-up to the Iraq war, to provide a rationale for invasion.
Eventually, he concocts an elaborate plan to test his hypotheses, a plan that will make him the target of some of his own colleagues. For that matter, the colonel and Skip both learn that they can trust no one, least of all those who are supposedly their comrades-in-arms in the cold war.
Johnson intercuts the stories of Skip and the colonel with those of half a dozen other people caught up in the war. There's James Houston, a young drifter who has followed his brother into the military and finds himself in the midst of a war with no rules, a war in which the heat and the jungle and the confusions of fighting a guerrilla enemy lead to acts of startling brutality and horror. There's Kathy Jones, a nurse who winds up in Vietnam after her husband, a missionary, is killed, and who has a brief, seemingly desultory, affair with Skip. And there's Hao, a Vietnamese functionary, who dreams of a better life in Singapore or the US, and uses his boyhood friendship with a member of the Vietcong to try to advance his interests with the Americans.
Johnson's orchestration of these characters' intersecting lives is often graceless - as his last couple of novels have demonstrated, plotting has never been one of his strengths - and he has an unfortunate tendency to embroider their adventures with lots of portentous philosophizing about good and evil and religious faith. His heat-seeking eye for detail and his ability to render those observations in hot, tactile prose, however, immerse us so thoroughly in the fetid world of the war and the even more noxious world of espionage that they effectively erase the book's occasional longueurs.
Johnson not only succeeds in conjuring the anomalous, hallucinatory aura of the Vietnam War as authoritatively as Stephen Wright or Francis Ford Coppola, but he also shows its fallout on his characters with harrowing emotional precision. He has written a flawed but deeply resonant novel that is bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war.
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