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“Denis Johnson’s seventh novel is his masterpiece and perhaps one of the most powerful novels published in the last several years.
As in his other works but here on a larger scale, his characters negotiate a dark, violent world in search of meaning, some kind of salvation. And Johnson takes us with them into the world’s pain and these souls’ anguish in a narrative that carries us along, turning the pages, anxious to see where the story leads. Though the novel is long (over 600 pages), it consists of many set pieces punctuated by dialogue, concrete detail and the laconic brilliance of poetry.
The story’s outline is simple, beginning in 1963 in the Philippines, just after President Kennedy’s assassination. Each section is a succeeding year, through 1970, with a coda in 1983. The array of characters includes Skip Sands, a CIA recruit working under his uncle, Francis X. Sands, a legendary CIA operative; Kathy Jones, a widowed Canadian nurse who leaves her Seventh-day Adventist faith; Trung, a North Vietnamese spy; Bill and James Houston, brothers and GIs who cannot adjust to civilian life; and Sgt. Jimmy Storm, whose long quest for revelation ends in a bizarre native ritual in the Malaysian jungle.
No character’s story dominates, and each feels real and honestly drawn, a mixture of hopeful aspiration and disappointing failure. The story moves from the Philippines to Vietnam, where Skip, his uncle and Storm work on an undercover operation called Tree of Smoke (the phrase also comes from the literal Hebrew of Joel 2:30). Kathy works with orphans in the war-torn country, and James is there with the Army, having signed up at age 17, then re-upping for three tours. Meanwhile, his brother Bill is dishonorably discharged from the Navy and heads back to Phoenix and, eventually, prison. (Bill’s character appears in Johnson’s first novel, “Angels,” at a later point in his life.)
Johnson has published poetry and reportage, and he puts both skills to use in his novels. In a letter, Skip’s mother writes, “A poem doesn’t have to rhyme. It just has to remind you of things and wring them out of you.” Johnson’s prose continually wrings emotions out of readers, drawing us into troubled lives as they experience the mystery of suffering in the world.
The book includes many poetic turns, for example, “He could hear also the pulse snickering in the heat of his flesh, and the creak of sweat in his ears.” The action is marked by unpredictable turns, yet it follows an arc that fills out the story’s themes.
Those themes include Johnson’s major one of the possibility of grace amid inexplicable suffering. He dissects America and the Vietnam experience, showing it through a variety of perspectives—soldiers, spies, medical volunteers and the Vietnamese themselves. It is a war that “failed to give any romances outside of hellish myths.” Violence erupts amid beauty and tenderness. Throughout the book, a cloud of hopelessness hovers over small acts of humanity.
Colonel Sands says at one point, “The dividing line between dark and light goes through the center of every heart.” While this borders on cliché, it also captures a major theme of the book. Skip encounters that dark as he re-enters Southeast Asia in 1966, when he “came into the shadow of the mystery that would devour him.”
A book this big and ambitious is bound to have flaws. Some of Johnson’s set pieces get caught up in the realism and go on too long, while others seem cut off too quickly. Some of the characters blend together a bit. And he places Skip’s mother in Clements, Kansas, though clearly he does not know Clements.
“Tree of Smoke” has resonances of “Heart of Darkness” and “Catch-22,” and Johnson draws on the influences of Graham Greene and Robert Stone. The ending has the grit and grace, the apocalyptic universalism of a Flannery O’Connor story. Nevertheless, his voice is unique in fiction. No one writes like he does. He is that rare artist who seeks not just to entertain or convince but to wring revelation out of the story.
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Gordon H wrote this review Thursday, November 15 2007.
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