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.
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