Tree of Smoke

This book is over 700 pages, and I think I was almost halfway through before I felt like I had even a little bit of a sense of what was going on. By the end, though, I think I maybe kind of loved it?

It captures the Vietnam War as a sprawling, disorienting system that damages nearly everyone and everything it touches. Skip and the Colonel represent the bureaucratic and intelligence layers of the U.S. war machine. Jimmy Storm feels like exactly the kind of delusional soldier such a war was bound to create. The Houston brothers are the confused and battered boots on the ground, while their mother represents the families suffering from home. Trung Than and the Hao family show the impossible position of Vietnamese civilians simply trying to survive. Dietrich Fest brings in the shadowy, semi-rogue world of assassination and covert operations. Kathy Jones is a compassionate aid worker who keeps trying to do the right thing while slowly losing her hope in humanity. Plus, an ever-present background of Asian women forced into prostitution, also trying to survive this brutal system.

The cast of characters, and the way Johnson develops them, is so damn good. Things like the gritty dialogue, the time jumps, and how the characters fade in and out of importance, made everything feel very real. The Colonel especially is a perfect representation of the kind megalomaniacal power figure I hate the most, the kind who feeds his ego by treating secret missions and battle plans as a cute little game.

Yes, it was a purposefully confusing book, but the confusion made for an excellent portrayal of the disorienting nature of the Vietnam War itself. And the story did ultimately turn into something really exciting. I do think that some parts were long just for the sake of being long, and the tone at the very end seemed like it didn’t fit. This is one I would reread in the future though.

Book author: Denis Johnson