New Vietnam Novel Nothing But ‘Smoke’ and Mirrors

Denis Johnson could not have chosen a more fitting title for his newest novel, “Tree of Smoke.” The novel is nearly as thick as a tree, reaching the epic length of 614 pages. And those hundreds of pages seem to contain nothing more than smoke.

While each sentence, each paragraph, and each page is unapologetically lyrical and unabashedly grand, with a pronounced biblical undercurrent that promises depth, the work lacks substance, lacks true cohesion—lacks whatever it is that makes a work captivating, wonderful, or enjoyable.

Despite its promise and its moments of greatness and beauty, “Tree of Smoke” ultimately proves enigmatic, inaccessible, and disappointing.

In the novel, which is mostly set in Vietnam from 1963 to 1970, “Tree of Smoke” is the name of a covert operation, the brainchild of a powerful, charismatic CIA operative known simply as the Colonel. It is the Colonel’s obsession to use a double agent, a philosophically disillusioned North Vietnamese man, to trick the Vietcong into thinking that some crazed commandos have stolen an atomic bomb and are trying to detonate it in Hanoi.

Skip, the self-loathing, introverted CIA underling who acts as our protagonist, serves as the Colonel’s point man for this operation. The deception, the Colonel believes, will force the Vietcong’s hand and lead to victory for the Americans. But like so much else in the book, this plan never comes to fruition, instead ending in half-sentences and unuttered phrases, leaving the reader wondering if it ever existed at all.

In Denis Johnson’s last and best-known book, 1993’s “Jesus’ Son,” he demonstrated his mastery of short fiction. In stories such as “Emergency,” in which a man comes into an ER with a hunting knife buried in his forehead, Johnson illustrated a genius for images that would haunt and nag well after the actual book was put down. He proved he had an almost instinctive understanding of language, forming sentences that were simultaneously lyrical and rough. They seemed to read themselves; the words leapt off the page and hovered in the air.

When Johnson turns his attention to a longer narrative his authorial gifts are still very much present, but their luster is dimmed.

He remains extremely capable of crafting images that burn themselves into your imagination. His earliest are his best: A just-shipped-over seaman callously shoots a monkey, only to realize that the monkey, in its death throes, is crying. “Its breath came out in sobs, and tears welled out of its eyes when it blinked.” A new recruit’s first experience in ‘Nam: he lies in bed with a prostitute who is “blowing smoke from her crotch while the jukebox in the next room played ‘Satisfaction’ by the Rolling Stones.” However, a few potent images cannot carry a novel like they can a short story.

And that is the problem with the work: Johnson relies too much on images and respects plot too little. The plot is seemingly dormant throughout, nascent and budding but never fully developed. To attempt a summary is impossible. The book splays out like a carpet of smoke, following a plethora of characters through the war. It recounts each one’s experience, and there never is a feeling of completion, never any satisfaction to be gained from it. It is too diffuse. The reader enters into Vietnam, finds himself there, but without a story to guide him through, he ends up as lost as the protagonists.

In Johnson’s attempt to generate higher meaning, his characters always conceive of Vietnam as a metaphor. They never recognize it as being what it is, but rather as a symbol for something else. It becomes a place of tunnels and labyrinths, where lost souls roam. It becomes a hell full of demonic pleasure and pain, but is not recognized as humid, foreign, gritty Vietnam long enough for it to become a concrete place.

Perhaps Johnson is trying to make a statement about how humans think in metaphor, that we are not literal beings. But, like his portrayal of Vietnam, that conception of thinking rings hollow. Is that really the sum totality of human thought?

“Tree of Smoke” is massive in every sense of the word. It is a work that reaches for epic but falls short. It is a work that aspires to examine the big universal themes: love, war, religion. It tells the story of men (and one woman) who can never escape the war they were caught in, who are eventually consumed by it, or wish they were. It tries to communicate truth, but the truth is too deeply hidden by its own attempts at complexity. Yes, “Tree of Smoke” is most definitely trying to say something urgent about the human condition, but that message remains lost, obfuscated by itself, obfuscated by everything that is not said, by what should have been told and was not, and by what was told but should not have been.

—Staff writer Sanders I. Bernstein can be reached at sbernst@fas.harvard.edu.