A short history of warfare in novels might go something like this. The nineteenth-century masters zoomed in for a sensory-packed, disorienting close-up — Stendhal’s Waterloo or Tolstoy’s Borodino — then returned to the classical architecture of their story. Stephen Crane in The Red Badge of Courage realized that the close-up was all he needed, and he discarded the commanders and their strategies as irrelevant to the topsy-turvy experience of war. It remained for Joseph Heller in Catch-22 to depict a Second World War in which the madness of the battlefield ascends all the way up the command structure. Instead of a Hermitage with one crazy grotto, or a stand-alone hall of mirrors, you had the Watts Towers.
What was left for the Vietnam novelist? Drugs, for one thing. From the stoked-up language of Michael Herr’s Dispatches (technically reportage, but the line between fiction and non-fiction was — not coincidentally — one of the barriers that was breaking down) to the dreamlike haze of Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, the influence of grass, acid, and speed is detectable in virtually all of the best literature of the war. You could categorize books, or even passages within books, with the precision of a urinalysis lab technician. And instead of minuets or the Andrews Sisters, by the time Vietnam came along (this too may be no coincidence) there was a popular music that jibed perfectly with the maddening intensity and monotony of warfare.
In Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson has written a Vietnam chronicle that spans as much time and space as an old-fashioned novel — over the course of two decades, it alights in the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and Arizona, as well as what was then South Vietnam. The book offers many of the satisfactions of the old-fashioned novel: memorable characters, narrative intrigue, suspense. But it doesn’t feel old-fashioned. The characters are believable without being likable or even sympathetic. The narrative keeps you guessing without supplying many answers. And through the driving force of language, it skates over each potential drop into sentimentality. One of the book’s peculiar virtues is that the tone is unified and distinctive without ever settling down. It is like a piece of music that refuses to resolve into a key. At times it veers toward religious grandiosity or Pynchonian paranoia or plainspoken naturalism, but it doesn’t stop, it keeps moving on.
Johnson sets out to depict what one of his characters calls “a rocknroll war” in a country that is “Disneyland on acid.” As in Alice in Wonderland, the landscape is riddled with tunnels. Everything is unaccountably complicated, so that “no one could train for this in any way that counted.” One character ruminates that he had “come to war to see abstractions become realities” and had found instead, “Everything was abstract now.” Duplicity is the order of the day, every day: “In the shit bucket of Vietnam, every living thing is double.” The book takes its plot and its structure from that trope. The main characters appear in pairs: the idealistic counterintelligence operative Skip Sands and his swashbuckling uncle Colonel Sands; the ne’er-do-well Houston brothers, Bill Jr. and James, one scary and the other simply pathetic; the U.S. Army employee Nguyen Hao and his boyhood friend Trung Than, a Vietminh agent. Everyone has at least one double, and sometimes more than one. (Skip, for example, is periodically coupled with a recently widowed missionary nurse.) The plot itself is obscured in a thicket of deceit and disinformation, but it involves a ruse that uses duplicity to smoke out duplicity, and falls apart when an intended victim has his place taken by another man. It is never certain who is plotting or what is the plot, either to the characters or (and I hope I am not overgeneralizing here) to the reader.
This is Johnson’s contribution to the literature of Vietnam and to war literature. He has landed on the device of agent and double agent, one that is ideally suited for a counterinsurgency campaign like Vietnam, as Graham Greene demonstrated in The Quiet American. Like Greene, Johnson is obsessed by the duality of human nature; but unlike Greene, he lacks the temperament to indulge in the chesslike moves of counterintelligence. Rather than step back and give us a perspective view of the madness, he has placed his authorial vantage point in the midst of the confusion. It is a third-person narrative that gains no clarity of distance in the telling. His characters seek meaning or redemption in the murk. Looking for something they are very unlikely to find, they lose their sense of where they are. To tell it any other way, Johnson is saying, would be dishonest to the experience of the Vietnam war, and to his experience of the world.
Arthur Lubow, a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, also writes for Smithsonian, Departures, and other magazines. He is the author of a book about Richard Harding Davis called The Reporter Who Would Be King.
