Tree of Smoke

Once upon a time there was a war . . . and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That’s me. - William “Skip” Sands

         The star of Denis Johnson’s latest novel, the Vietnam war, is displayed at once as a brutal epic without hero and a stagnant place; a physical place, but also a place in the minds of those affected, a place for which nothing had prepared them. “Tree of Smoke” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) is a massive medley of characters and chronicles that converge and fall away. The 614 page masterwork demands contradiction. It is somehow a fleeting behemoth.
         “Tree of Smoke” is a study of absolute depths. Johnson seems to suggest war as a tool of the universe, a universe hostile to human existence. The novel is soaked in loss, fear, and an eventual numbness within wherewithal, as if last nerves have been hit with Xylocaine. Sadness reigns over this giant book, though the senses are so exercised by such lyrical and vibrant language that the pages leaf by. The story is seen through a kaleidoscope, through the eyes of three central characters and their innumerable satellites spanning the years between 1963 and 1970 with a postlude set in 1983. William “Skip” Sands is a greenhorn member of the C.I.A, influenced by and entangled in the legend of his rouge Uncle, the Kurtz-like former POW known to many simply as the Colonel, a man of prowess and danger, built of myth and bravado. The book also follows Bill and younger brother James Houston out of the Arizona desert and into the jungles of Southern Asia. James is willingly ripped from the high-school youth he knew and tossed into a war without rules, without hope, a moral black-hole.
         Multiple reviews of this book by those much more talented than I evoke the name Dostoevsky when discussing this author’s passion, or Poe when fear be the focus. Of Johnson, Vince Passaro said, “We can hear Twain in his bitter irony, Whitman in his erotic excess.” Johnson writes of fear so convincingly that he seems to be a connoisseur of the emotion.
         This of James Houston: “They assigned him to Vietnam. He knew it meant he was dead. He hadn’t applied, hadn’t even asked how you apply, they’d just handed him his fate. Four days out of basic, here he carried his lunch toward a table in the enlisted mess, the steamy odor of reconstituted mashed potatoes rising toward his face, and his legs felt like rubber as he stepped toward a future scattered with booby traps and land mines; they’d be on patrol and in front and he’d step on something that would just rip the veins right out of him, splash him around like paint—before the noise hit his ears, his ears would be shredded—you just, probably, hear the tiniest beginning of a little hiss.”
         In this war innocence is obliterated. The young Skip Sands of 1965 believes in the American involvement. He believes in a war that can be won. “At the sight of the flag Skip tasted tears in his throat. In the Stars and Stripes 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 Two, 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 his childhood...the stunned streets of breezeless afternoons...the whirring of redwing blackbirds, the sadness of the grown-ups at their incomprehensible pursuits...His love for his country, his homeland, was a love for the United States of America in the summertime.” This Skip Sands will not make it out of the war’s heavy darkness. He eventually devolves to nothing more than a self-proclaimed Ugly, Fucking American.
         Like Stephen Crane, Johnson writes brilliantly of the scattered senses of a youth in the face of first battle. Under fire, James Houston “asked, am I moving? The dark was thick enough to drink and streaked with the afterimages of tracers and muzzle-flash. Now it was quiet. Not even a bug droning. In such unprecedented silence James could tell just from the tiny sound his clip made as the sling ticked against it that the clip was empty, whereas only two minutes ago the surrounding noise had been so magnificent he couldn’t hear his own screaming. In this new silence he didn’t want to replace the clip for fear all the senses of the enemy would lock on to the sound and he’d be shredded, shredded, shredded.”
         Unfortunately, because of the large number of characters, it takes a very close reader to follow each relationship and the plot which unfolds beneath them. It is as easy to find yourself lost in this novel as I suspect it would be in the Vietcong tunnels. The plot is huge and arduous. Perhaps this was intentional. Perhaps the free-flowing haze of a plot accentuates a deeper theme Johnson is trying to convey throughout the book— Desolation breeds delusion.
         A constant current running through the Book of Johnson is the human inability to completely understand, or rather the lack of a final truth. “There shall be blood and fire and palm trees of smoke – from Joel, wasn’t it?” Johnson writes. “Incredible how the English came back. And the scripture, too, back from the darkness. Joel, yes, the second chapter, usually translated ‘pillars of smoke,’ but the original Hebrew said ‘palm trees of smoke.’ ” When scripture is recognized as flawed (or the interpretation, anyway) what must that say of the human situation and our distance from any firm resolution? Johnson champions the angle of the individual. When isolated in war, in Hell, previously accepted reality melts and perception is left. Beneath the heavy shadow of dense prose, the characters are lost in their own specific existence. Because of this we see with them (even before them) that they all share the same thing: Death. Death may have a different meaning to each man, but what they are left with after years of sweating bullets, constantly surrounded by agony, doesn’t resemble any life they have ever known or thought possible. Wrapped in all of it, all of the emptiness, young James Houston refuses to return home to his mother because “her zealous hope of heaven made it hell there.”
         Despite the occasional highs and the continuous chilling low, the book isn’t always set to overdrive. Johnson, like any great writer, can find beauty in the banal. This is Skip Sands enjoying breakfast at a bowling alley. “Despite the general noise there was a kind of tiptoe stealth in the approach of some of these athletes, a stalking, bird-dog concentration. Others lumbered to the line and flung like shot-putters. Skip had never bowled, never before this moment even observed. The appeal was obvious, the cleanly geometry, the assurances of physical ballistics, the organic richness of the wooden lanes and the mute servitude of the machines that raised the pins and swept away the fallen, above all the powerlessness and suspense, the ball held, the ball directed, the ball traveling away like a son, beyond hope of influence. A slow, large, powerful game.”
         Kathy Jones, a World Children’s Service worker and acquaintance of Skip Sands, is a minor character who falls from grace as quickly as any of the military men. “In these damp nights the temperature of human breath she felt a moldering and sleepy grief born, she was convince, of self infatuation—a slow, hot , tropical self-pity.” writes Johnson, “She needed to turn outward, to find others, she needed her duties in the countryside. Or she’d sink. Rot in the underneath. Be devoured by this land. Flower up as new violence and despair.”
         This novel is of daunting size, but once the coda sets in and the pages slip by, you will find yourself wishing it were longer. Johnson is among the largest, brightest moons to have risen over literature in some years. He should feel at home in the sky, for it is the only limit to his potential. As Jim Lewis for the New York Times put it, “We very badly need more novelists who can write this well.”

Excuse for poor review: I was packing.
Segues are overrated anyway.