Return to story

'TREE' ROOTED IN VIETNAM WAR not just smoke and mirrors BY DREW GALLAGHER

December 30, 2007 12:36 am

IF YOU ARE perched on the threshold of 2008 still searching for an ambitious yet attainable New Year's resolution, you may want to attempt Denis Johnson's "Tree of Smoke." The novel won the 2007 National Book Award and is on most year-end best-of fiction lists so it has the credentials to impress folks at your next dinner party.

But this deeply involved Vietnam book is not something that should be undertaken lightly. The first 200 pages are mere introduction to the body of the work and the following of the assorted characters would benefit greatly from a flowchart kept at the reader's side. The novel proves to be worth the effort and concentration though as Johnson captures the feel of a war over 30 years after its conclusion, and he is able to offer profound assessments that could only be rendered at such a distance of time.

"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."

The characters in "Tree of Smoke" all reach a variation on that same conclusion. It's the same conclusion that has been reached in much Vietnam literature and portrayed in celluloid, but the way Johnson conveys it is poetic and, at some of its best moments, darkly comical. Beneath the pathos and poignancy of the war there is a surreal uneasiness that pervades the characters and their stories. Johnson skillfully unravels tales that one could never believe and yet the reader has a sense that they most certainly did exist.

It is this sense from which the novel gets its name. A tree of smoke is visible but nebulous. It is momentarily there but fades into air and only the question of what it was lingers.

There is a hesitancy in categorizing the entire Vietnam War as a tree of smoke because there is a fear that to do so would be seen as minimizing the profound impact it had on so many lives. But what it was and what it is remain to be explored even if there is no beginning and no end as Johnson deftly offers.

Drew Gallagher is a freelance reviewer living in Spotsylvania.