Volume 54, Number 16 · October 25, 2007
Vietnam: Portraits from a Tragedy
By Norman Rush
Tree of Smoke
by Denis Johnson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 614 pp., $27.00
Tree of Smoke is an ambitious, long, dense, daunting novel sited at the heart of a great American evil, the Vietnam War. It's unusual—a gripping yet essentially plotless novel consisting of intercut segments of the lives of people caught up in the war, concentrating on four American men and a Canadian woman. Vietnamese characters appear in the montage as well, most of them collaborationists of one sort or another. In Tree of Smoke, which has been in the making for ten years, Denis Johnson is engaged in a dead serious attempt fully to apprehend the whole dreadful business, and in his evocations of settings and events he demonstrates real authority. Like the war itself, Tree of Smoke delivers an intense experience of loss, shame, futility, confusion—all without benefit of editorializing. And this novel arrives just as grotesque revisionist interpretations of the Vietnam War are brought to bear in the public discourse about our present bloody adventure in Iraq.
Review, 4196 words
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