Tree of Smoke
by Denis Johnson
Summary
Skip Sands joins the CIA in 1965 a believer: in the war coming in Vietnam, in the agency, and above all in his uncle, Colonel Francis Xavier Sands, a genuine legend, Second World War hero, freelance warrior prince running psychological operations out of a web of bases, bars and private loyalties. Skip's first assignments are farcical, cataloguing the Colonel's tree of smoke, a vast card file of intelligence that turns out to be useless, and studying folklore in a Philippine village, and the farce is the point: the novel is about the production of belief, in gods, in wars, in uncles.
Johnson threads four lives through the decade. Skip, marooned in a Saigon safe house as the Colonel's schemes go rogue, a double agent operation curdling into something nobody authorised. Kathy Jones, a Canadian aid worker and widow of a murdered missionary, whose faith survives on the war's casualty wards and whose affair with Skip is the book's one uncorrupted transaction. And the Houston brothers, Bill and James, Arizona enlisted men on the war's bottom rung, drifting from tours into stateside wreckage, petty crime and the long hangover.
The Colonel dies, or does not, becoming a rumour the war keeps using; Skip takes the fall for the wreckage, disappears into the gunrunning margins, and ends on a gallows in Malaysia. An epilogue in 1983 sifts the survivors.
Around six hundred pages, written in Johnson's ecstatic, hallucinated prose.
Best for readers who want the Vietnam novel as fever dream, spies and grunts and missionaries all mistaking their visions for intelligence.
Historical Context & Significance
Tree of Smoke won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2007 and was a Pulitzer finalist, arriving as an event: Denis Johnson, the poet of American damage, whose 1992 story collection Jesus' Son had become one of the most influential books of its era, delivering at last the big novel. The New York Times all but pronounced it a masterpiece; B. R. Myers in The Atlantic wrote one of the era's most quoted demolitions, arguing the pantheon was protecting its own, and the argument between those two reviews has been part of the book's identity ever since. The Times' 2024 ranking of the century's best books kept it on the list.
Johnson had spent his career among addicts, drifters and visionaries, and the war gave his repertory company its largest stage; Bill Houston had appeared before, the main character of Angels, his debut novel.
He died in 2017, with Train Dreams, his celebrated 2011 novella, completing a shelf whose influence on younger American writers rivals anyone's of his generation.