Like other such episodes, this one comes and goes in the space of ten stark pages. In dangerous currents, the amputee rises “storklike on his single leg” and tips himself into the water, refusing to be rescued but still fighting his way back to shore. In one of the many tour de force episodes in the book, James, drunk and AWOL, accompanies a suicidal amputee into the South China Sea on a thatch boat.

“This war is my home,” he replies.Ī broken and abusive home at that. “Don’t you want to see home?” someone asks him in Vietnam. Similarly, James Houston, Bill’s younger brother, joins the service at the age of 17, then re-ups without hesitation. Fatherless, impressionable, a reader of Marcus Aurelius, he is a seeker who isn’t yet sure what he is seeking, and he looks to war for definition. The dislocation, this absence of normal order, is precisely the appeal of war for the colonel’s nephew, Skip Sands, who is the closest thing to an organizing consciousness in this diffuse story. Fires to light the minds and heart, the acts of men.

All was ideology and imagery and conjuring. A charismatic rogue, the colonel sees in the maelstrom of war not chaos but incipient myth: “To hell with reason, categories, synthesis, common sense. At the center of the book’s action is the oversized Colonel Sands, who with 19,000 index cards of notes is organizing CIA operations in Southeast Asia, first in the Philippines, later in Vietnam.

Set largely in the 1960s, this loose, sprawling novel tracks numerous characters into the mythical heart of American darkness: the Vietnam War. Tree of Smoke, which won the National Book Award for fiction, is a searing vision of a world without shores. When would he strike out for shore? When would he receive the gift of desperation? But this morning in particular he felt like a man overboard far from any harbor, keeping afloat only for the sake of it, waiting for his strength to give out. He’d lived almost twenty-five years, his hardships colored in his own mind as youthful adventures, someday to be followed by a period of intense self-betterment, then accomplishment and ease. Late in Denis Johnson’s novel, one of his many defeated, aimless characters, Bill Houston, surveys what Johnson elsewhere calls “the cancelled life”:

Tree of smoke