Ssssmokin! A review

In 2006, The New York Times included Denis Johnson's superb 1992 story collection, Jesus' Son, in a round-up of the best American fiction of the last 25 years. The book also made him a favorite of those who like reading about stoners and petty thieves.

But Johnson pushed past Bukowski's street angels long ago; now he's deep into Robert Stone territory. His latest, Tree of Smoke, is a brilliant pillar of fire. An epic novel of bungled espionage and small mercies in Vietnam, it is Johnson's 643-page ticket out of cult status. The story cross-cuts between two pairs of characters from 1963 to 1983: The Houston brothers drop out and join the military, while a duo of spooks--the legendary, whiskey-swilling Colonel Sands and his nephew Skip--get neck-deep into delusional derring-do. It doesn't really matter that the Houstons and the Sandses never connect; they parallel each other until a rogue operation that the wily colonel concocts has Skip doing business with a Vietcong double agent.

Betrayals, confusions, hit jobs: We know these jungles from Graham Greene and Apocalypse Now. But Tree of Smoke also steps (too often, perhaps) into writer Antonin Artaud's hallucinogenic travels. This is the novelist as psy ops agent, and the novel as quest for redemption: One operative even boasts to Skip that he works -- much like Johnson's haunting, tragic and humane novel -- on the edge of reality, "Right where it turns into a dream."