'Tree of Smoke'

Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

With the newest adaption of The Great Gatsby soon arriving at a silver screen near you, I’ve been interested to see various opinions of the novel appearing across the Internet: It seems we agree that Gatsby is a great novel, but many of us didn’t enjoy it very much. 

Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke---the 2007 National Book Award winner for fiction---may have given me a similar, Gatsby-esque experience.  Before Tree of Smoke, I’d read a tragicomic book called The Imperfectionists; I enjoyed reading it but regretted that I had.  Tree of Smoke is the opposite.

Could it be, however, that I’m only succumbing to the hubris inherent in wanting to enjoy important fiction?  Johnson’s tome has all of those telltale signs.  It won prestigious awards, ran on very long (700+ pages), lacked a coherent plot, jumped wildly between major characters and time periods, and ended with an irresolute sense of ennui.  Send in the clowns!

But not so fast.  There’s a difference between books that ridicule who we are (read: The Imperfectionists) and others that grieve over it.  The former type dehumanizes us, but the latter yields a quiet sobriety that brings us back to our better angels.  One of the characters in Tree of Smoke observes, “I know from experience that life is suffering, and that suffering comes from clinging to things that won’t stay.”  I find that to be a bitter axiom, but probably a true one.  Realistically, if our world is broken, what alternative do we have to clinging to things that won’t stay?  Better to cling and then lament than not to need at all.  Watching sports will only take us so far.

The Vietnam War provides the backdrop for the entirety of Tree of Smoke, although the novel is not really about the war.  Instead, Vietnam becomes a projection of our conflicted psychology that removes us farther and farther from our unified selves.  One soldier in the book wonders out loud, “It’s just stupid, man. Have you looked around yourself lately? This isn’t a war. It’s a disease. A plague.”  The late 20th century’s allegorical cave.

The main character of the book, to the extent that there is one, is Skip Sands, a CIA psy-ops agent whose role in the conflict becomes increasingly unclear.  Skip’s uncle, simply referred to as the “Colonel,” is a semi-rogue operative in the area; the novel begins with Skip serving his country by aiding him.  Soon after, Skip merely helps his uncle as the U.S.’s interests (whatever they might have been in Vietnam) recede from view, after which Skip finally serves no larger interests than his own.  (The “Tree of Smoke” itself is the Colonel’s master plan for spying against the Vietcong; however, although the Colonel calls the Tree of Smoke his “guiding light of a sincere goal for the function of intelligence,” the Tree of Smoke comes to represent the wisps of everything ambiguous about the war.)  The fascinating aspect of the arc of Skip’s moral decline is that he ends up crossing the line specifically because it doesn’t look like there is one.  None of us simply decides one day to be a monster; it grows on us.  

Skip eventually is executed years following the Vietnam War for running guns throughout the far east.  Days before he faces his firing squad, he writes to an ex-girlfriend, “After I left Vietnam I quit working for the giant-size criminals I worked for when I knew you and started working for the medium size. Lousy hours and no fringe benefits, but the ethics are clearer. And the stakes are plain. You prosper until you’re caught. Then you lose everything.”  The author has already shown us, however, that Skip had lost everything long before he lost everything, even if (scarily) we’re not sure just when that first loss occurred.  Still, we cling to what won’t stay, and therefore we suffer for Skip while we avoid the mirror.

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