Tree of Smoke

Uncle F.X., pillar of fire, tree of smoke, wanted to raise a great tree in his own image, a mushroom cloud – if not a real one over the rubble of Hanoi, then its dreaded possibility in the mind of Uncle Ho, the Enemy King. And who could say the delirious old warrior didn't grapple after actual truths? Intelligence, data, analysis be damned; to hell with reason, categories, synthesis, common sense. All was ideology and imagery and conjuring. Fires to light the minds and heat the acts of men. And cow their consciences. Fireworks, all of it – not just the stuff of history, but the stuff of reality itself, the thoughts of God – speechless and obvious: incandescent patterns, infinitely widening.

I always feel the need to explain myself for context when I review an American-centric book like Tree of Smoke, so here goes again: As a Canadian, the Vietnam War hasn't bound me to my fellow citizens with communal psychic scars – I didn't lose an older brother to the VC, I don't have a crazy and legless Uncle-Lieutenant-Dan, I was raised in the smug knowledge that we didn't get involved in the Asian quagmire; that, rather, Canada provided safe haven for the teenage American draft dodger with the unlucky lottery number – so while I'm not uninterested in stories about Vietnam, they're no more personal to me than stories about the Irish Troubles or the Third Balkan War, both of which I also lived through; it can all be fascinating history, certainly worthy of literary treatment, but it's not particularly my own intimately felt history. I also lived through the Iran-Contra Affair, the training of the Afghan Mujahideen, and Saddam Hussein's missing Weapons of Mass Destruction, so I'm unsurprised by a storyline involving covert CIA operations and how their intelligence-gathering influences American policy; or how this preordained policy influences the intelligence that's gathered. So, really, a book like this comes down to the writing for me, and overall, that was an uneven experience: some parts I loved, some parts were dull, and while its six hundred+ pages felt like far too much in the moment, I was more melancholy than relieved to have finished it. 

Other readers seem to be of two minds as well: the top Goodreads review gives Tree of Smoke one star (followed by a string of fours and fives), and the experts are also divided, with Jim Lewis writing in The New York Times: Denis Johnson is a true American artist, and “Tree of Smoke” is a tremendous book, a strange entertainment, very long but very fast, a great whirly ride that starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder, loops unpredictably out and around, and then lurches down so suddenly at the very end that it will make your stomach flop. And by contrast, B. R. Meyers wrote in The Atlantic: One closes the book only with a renewed sense of the decline of American literary standards. It would be foolish to demand another Tolstoy, but shouldn’t we expect someone writing about the Vietnam War to have more sense and eloquence than the politicians who prosecuted it? I feel really wishy-washy in the face of so much passion to award three stars, but I wasn't excited into either love or hate territory by Tree of Smoke; I can neither defend nor condemn it winning the National Book Award for 2007.

Tree of Smoke is told from several rotating points-of-view – covering the years of 1963-1970, with a coda from 1983 – but it is primarily focussed on William “Skip” Sands; a rookie CIA agent covertly stationed in Vietnam (“I'm from Del Monte”) under the nebulous command of his uncle – a WWII war hero, early Psy-Ops agent, currently a civilian operating under the honorific “Colonel” who can commandeer a platoon and a helicopter and a mountaintop, yet of unspecified authority – and while Skip thinks he would love to get close to the action, Uncle Francis has him compiling and cross-referencing a secret filing system. I really liked that we watch Skip change through the years – him becoming more cynical in his jungle villa as the tumblers of Bushmills and servant-cooked Beef Noodle Soup makes his regular uniform of bathing trunks and boxcut dress shirt grow ever tighter – and his remove from both the fighting and the experience back home feels a fresh slant on the war:

Martin Luther King had been killed. Robert Kennedy had been killed. The North Koreans still held an American naval vessel and her crew. The Marines besieged at Khe Sanh, the infantry slaughtering the whole village of My Lai, hirsute, self-righteous idiots marching in the streets of Chicago. Among the hairy ones the bloody failure of January's Tet Offensive had resounded as a spiritual victory. And then in May a second country-wide push, feebler, but nearly as resonant. He devoured Time and Newsweek and found it all written down there, yet these events seemed improbable, fictitious. In six or seven months the homeland from which he was exiled had sunk in the ocean of its future history.

I was led to Denis Johnson by his short story Dirty Wedding (which I discovered and loved in My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead), and it was the gritty realism of the experience of the underclass that wowed me in that story, so it's unsurprising that he includes here the war experience of a pair of brothers from the poor side of Phoenix – both of whom joined up underage to escape their final, futile year of high school – and I could almost argue that their unglamourous and pointless war stories (Bill Houston was discharged from the Navy for fighting and desertion and his younger brother James committed speed-fueled, blood-soaked Recon with the Infantry) and their States-side aftermath is the real heart of the book. We also follow some Vietnamese nationals: a businessman who decides to help the Americans with a view to getting out of Vietnam; his nephew who flies the Colonel's helicopter and who is just trying to survive; and the businessman's old friend – a disillusioned Communist who decides to turn on the Vietcong, and whom the Colonel wants to exploit as a double agent and send back north (in a "Tree of Smoke" psy-ops scheme). There is a German assassin and a Philippino mercenary and we also meet Kathy Jones: the Canadian wife of a murdered Missionary who stays on in the country to provide aid to orphans with her nursing skills. Kathy also hooks us with Skip a few times over the years, and is sanguine about the attitudes of the American soldiers she meets:

Well, you were sad about the kids for a while, for a month, two months, three months. You're sad about the kids, sad about the animals, you don't do the women, you don't kill the animals, but after that you realize this is a war zone and everybody here lives in it. You don't care whether these people live or die tomorrow, you don't care whether you yourself live or die tomorrow, you kick the children aside, you do the women, you shoot the animals.

And there is the storyline of the Colonel's aide, Jimmy Storm. Storm is a bit of a madman – like he's tripping on acid, constantly looking for ephemeral sensations and hidden connections – and when he learns in 1983 that the Colonel might still be alive and living in Thailand (the Colonel was said to have died during the war – of a heart attack? Of an assassin's blade? Maybe he faked his death to infiltrate the north?), he begins a very Search-for-Kurtz quest that culminates in Storm volunteering for a primitive soul-losing ritual (the horror!):

From the trees all around came the waterfall sound of scrabbling claws and the curses of demons driven into the void. More women screamed. The men howled. The jungle itself screamed like a mosque. Storm lay naked on his back and watched the upward-rushing mist and smoke in the colossal firelight and waited for the clear light, for the peaceful deities, the face of the father-mother, the light from the six worlds, the dawning of hell's smoky light and the white light of the second god, the hungry ghosts wandering in ravenous desire, the gods of knowledge and the wrathful gods, the judgment of the lord of death before the mirror of karma, the punishments of the demons, and the flight to refuge in the cave of the womb that would bear him back into this world.

Whether Johnson is a “true American artist” or proof of “the decline of American literary standards” seems beyond my ken. I can only evaluate my own experience – and I hope that by the inclusion of such long quotes I have given a sense of that experience – and I arrive at the wishy-washy: Tree of Smoke neither blew my mind nor bored me to tears. It felt too long, but I liked the sentences; I didn't really learn anything, but it didn't belabour the familiar; I'm not unhappy to have read it, but I didn't really need to read it. Three noncommittal stars.