Books

If you know the reputation of Denis Johnson, you know that the last thing he would offer in this novel of the Vietnam War is a neat, linear plot alternating napalm-drenched battles with scenes of bitter, stoned G.I.'s listening to the Doors and cursing Charlie.

That's not the way of Mr. Johnson, known for years of substance abuse, hallucinatory prose and tortured characters who navigate chaotic societies in search of epiphany and grace. An author who once wrote a play called Shoppers Carried by Escalators Into the Flames is unlikely to take the conventional road to anything.

Mr. Johnson, who was a visiting professor last year at Texas State University in San Marcos, is not well known to the general reading public. But fellow writers and critics rate him highly. When über-arbiter Harold Bloom chose his canon of contemporary American fiction, he anointed one book by John Updike, one by Joyce Carol Oates and three by Mr. Johnson: Angels, Fiskadoro and Jesus's Son.

Tree of Smoke, spanning the years 1963-70 and including a haunting epilogue set in 1983, may be the most battle-avoidant war novel ever written. Only a handful of the novel's 614 pages depict combat, and the first firefight doesn't erupt until almost halfway through the book.

Mr. Johnson can write gripping, frenzied battle scenes, but he's much more interested in the psychological and spiritual damage the war wreaks on a group of characters including Kathy Jones, a deeply religious Canadian nurse; Trung, a Viet Cong spy; the American Sgt. Jimmy Storm; William "Skip" Sands, a CIA spy working psychological operations; and Skip's uncle, Francis X. Sands, a legendary CIA mastermind and renegade known as the Colonel.

While the Colonel inspires reverence among some of the characters (especially Sgt. Storm, who deifies him), Mr. Johnson reveals his hubris: The Colonel has spent years in a quixotic attempt to compile every relevant fact about the Vietnamese enemy on thousands of index cards that form the "tree of smoke" of the title. The author deftly contrasts the irrational rationalism of the Colonel's manifesto, in which "waves of data ... cross-contaminate one another" with a scene in which the Colonel summarily executes a horribly tortured Viet Cong prisoner.

Though vast in scope and ambition, Tree of Smoke perhaps inevitably contains echoes of Graham Greene and movies such as Apocalypse Now, inspired by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness . There's more than a touch of the Conrad-Brando Kurtz in the Colonel, and one of the book's best sections, dealing with an assassin's cat-and-mouse pursuit of a suspected double agent, would feel right at home in a Greene novel.

Despite those fine moments, it's easier to be awed by Tree of Smoke than to like it. Some of the characters grasp at mystical meanings that shimmer just beyond their pain and fear, but many readers will be puzzled as to the nature of these revelations. Mr. Johnson wants to transcend the "Vietnam genre," but what he has created in its stead doesn't shed enough imaginative light on the national and personal ordeal of the war.

"All will be saved," thinks one character near the novel's end. But Tree of Smoke is hazy about just who or what will provide that deliverance. One thing's for sure: Little salvation came from the guns and bombs of a superpower flailing in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Chris Tucker is a Dallas writer, literary consultant and commentator for KERA-FM (90.1).

Denis Johnson

(FSG, $27)