It takes a brave writer to tackle the Vietnam War and its legacy. Denis Johnson, a renowned, fierce, literary novelist, has done just that, fully head on, with his 2007 epic, Tree of Smoke. It revs into action in 1963, the day JFK is assassinated, and parses the years until 1970, with a longish coda in 1983. The cast is huge and multifaceted: ‘Skip’ Sands, a naive, earnest anticommunist CIA operative ardently following his uncle, ‘the Colonel,’ a WWII hero and unstoppable Cold War warrior; Bill Houston, a sailor who loses his way, but not nearly as much as his younger brother James, who flees a religious Phoenix mother to plumb the depths of savagery in the middle of Vietnam; Hao, a South Vietnamese serving the Colonel, dreaming of safe passage away, and his Minh his nephew, and Trung Than their friend, now a Vietcong stalwart; Kathy Jones, the wife of a missionary; Jimmy Snow, a profane monomaniac assistant to the Colonel. The Colonel, a legend now perhaps operating outside the chain of command, lies at the heart of the novel, running operations as mysterious as they might be shady. Mostly the author tracks the fate of Skip Sands, the most bewildered of them all, but Johnson freely, and with delightful unpredictability, jumps into the skin of any of the other characters, all of them unmoored by the war America never needed to have, the unmitigated disaster for all sides.
Johnson is a brilliant, lyrical yet grounded stylist. Tree of Smoke crackles and pongs with the sights and smells of beautiful, ruined Vietnam. Every scene resounds with credibility, the horrors and the vitality equally portrayed. No clichés here, none whatsoever. The labyrinthine plot reminded me of Pynchon, the coruscating humour of no one else at all. Death, despair and madness expand their grips over the course of the 600-plus pages, yet somehow, as only the best writers can manage, Johnson construes the almighty mess of Vietnam as a triumph, of sorts, of the human spirit. Tree of Smoke is the most exciting, deep novel I have read since The Slap.