Denis Johnson
Tree of Smoke.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 624 pages, $27

Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke ought to be an awful book. It’s about the Vietnam War, so the reader can’t help but expect present-day Iraq dressed up in jungle camouflage. One character, the CIA veteran Francis Xavier Sands (“The Colonel”), sounds a little too Kurtzy for comfort, and his nephew Skip—a trainee spook whose very name evokes “Dennis the Menace” naiveté—must be a cardboard stand-in for the blundering idealism so often imputed to American foreign policy. Then there’s the question of length. Does Johnson need a more exacting editor, or is this one of those “ambitious” books we hear so much about?

Dead wrong on all counts. Against the odds, Tree of Smoke is tremendous, sui generis, and utterly engrossing. Notwithstanding a parallel or two dutifully sussed out by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, it’s no more about Iraq than it is about the Battle of Hastings. For that matter, it’s about Vietnam in only a very superficial sense: Johnson’s achievement isn’t to chronicle a conflict but to render the dark night of a dozen-odd souls in prose as brilliant and rousing as tracer fire. Along with F. X. Sands, who isn’t actually much like Kurtz at all, and Skip, there’s a widowed nurse named Kathy Jones, a pair of dumb and doomed brothers from Arizona, a German assassin, the Colonel’s manic acolytes, and a couple of Vietnamese men being groomed