Tree of Smoke: A Novel

"Tree of Smoke" By Denis Johnson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Hardcover, 614 pages, $27

Book review By ADAM HYLA, Editor

A G-man on his first assignment stops in at a Catholic Church on a Philippine island. It is 1965, and the young spy is growing his hair out in emulation of his martyred hero, JFK. He still believes in America.

The church homily, in a local tongue, is mostly unintelligible to him, but sprinkled here and there are a few words of English: demonic possession, exorcisms, fallen angels, spiritual investigation, psychological investigation. All might easily describe Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson, the beautifully understated story of a renegade colonel who plots to fight the Vietcong using their own country’s myths, but who, by the same means, cripples his brothers in arms.

Though there’s a devil, a Judas, and perhaps a Jesus, Johnson’s left behind the outré characters of earlier fiction for a study in disenchantment, a look at what happens after the trunk we leaned on, the branch we climbed up, the canopy we sheltered under, drifts away in the breeze.