Tree of Smoke

Denis Johnson's long-awaited Vietnam novel is as labyrinthine and mysterious as the tunnels of Cu Chi. Johnson follows dozens of characters, including the wayward Houston brothers (who appeared as would-be bank robbers in Johnson's nearly perfect first novel, ANGELS), a cadre of PsyOp (Psychological Operations) CIA agents led by the legendary Colonel Sands, an NLF double agent, a German assassin, a loyal South Vietnamese helicopter pilot, a theologically troubled Christian human-rights advocate, plus the countless grunts, Lurps, spies, whores, and crazies who provide the background to a world turned upside down with the madness of war. Ostensibly, the plot involves the Colonel's unauthorized plan to convince Hanoi that a rogue CIA agent with a nuclear bomb is loose in Vietnam. But Johnson has always been a writer more interested in the transcendent moment than in the over-arching narrative, and one reads TREE OF SMOKE for the piercing details, the troubled souls, the spiritual gloom and grandeur, the sudden and unexpected glimpses of exhilaration and transcendence, and the equally sudden plunges back into confusion and insanity. If the book feels fractured, it is because one of the novel's repeated themes is drawn from Corinthians: "And there are differences of administration, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operation, but it is the same God which worketh all in all." For Johnson, Vietnam is a constantly shifting reality, a land without set rules, without logic, a place that is always both heaven and hell. TREE OF SMOKE won the 2007 National Book Award.