Esquire
September 227

Tree of Smoke: A Novel
by Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson Killed the Sixties
A Review by Tom Chiarella

When it comes to the past, give it to me distant and pale. Herodotus, for instance. You can't really argue with the guy. City-states, swinging militarily from one end of the Aegean to the other, shapes of cultural movements described dryly and without dense moral hand-wringing. I like that stuff. By contrast, I've had enough of the near past, which I find confining, clouded by layer upon layer of artistic reckoning, and chronically overtold. The significance of recent decades ticks itself down like oily rosary beads on a short chain of self-importance. We get so much of what we can already remember. Still, in times of war, the cultural muscle is to revisit the past. But what the fuck are we looking for there? Morals? Lessons? One last glimpse of the jungle? Decades pass, books amble out of the brush, and we visit again and again with our devils. The question is: When to cease?

I'd say now. Right after we've all finished Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson, the last book I will ever read on the '60s. In part, that's because it's a big book, a story that works in the best ways a big book can -- a multipronged tale, told in a straight-ahead chapter-by-chapter chronology, clear and light-bearing as a great tale, something like Lonesome Dove for the Tet Offensive set.

To say that readers have been waiting for a large crossover book like this from Denis Johnson for 20 years now would only echo the beef that some people have with his darkly lyric Jesus' Son or the shattering Angels, his best and first novel -- that Johnson's work is somehow too bleak and narrow for a broader readership. And so Tree of Smoke is being heralded, at long last, as the remedy for just that condition.

The shank of the book follows Skip Sands, an operative in psychological operations against the Viet Cong, a weirdly exterior character who drifts from one mission to the next, haunted by the shadow of his uncle Francis Sands, a CIA legend whom they call simply the Colonel. Moving in and out of the years are two hard-luck brothers, Bill and James Houston, who knock around Pacific postings before drifting homeward, toward the presumably insoluble pull of the vacant and scary desert of Arizona. One pair makes you larger, and one pair makes you small.

You know this sort of book. The requisite multiple characters -- mishmashed across several continents -- living lives that at times feel disconnected while remaining steadfastly knotted in their fates and the misjudgments of their culture. It's a big, chunky shag carpet of a novel, stretching wall-to-wall between 1963 and 1970. There's nothing particularly tricky in the structure, nothing wildly experimental in the tone or language. The sweep is purposefully grand, and Johnson knows how to work a large global stage, bouncing from one subtropical locale to another, without noisome conjuring.

But the truth is, I won't read another book about the '60s because Tree of Smoke is old material, told in a fashion that is weirdly laconic and profoundly gung ho at the same time. Sometimes the dialogue throbs like a Sgt. Rock comic book, and then, pages later, a mere fistfight is described in a slippery, psychedelic light that is Johnson's own. I never know where to grab on, whom to care about. Maybe that's what the decade was like, too. I don't know. So many books. So many movies. I can't tell the difference between what I remember and what I've been told. Worse, I can't care anymore. And Tree of Smoke just doesn't make me.

The trouble is that, critics and publishing execs aside, no one was ever waiting for a knee-buckling crossover from Denis Johnson. He'd already dazzled and made us hurt. Done and done again. He'd already arrived.

San Francisco Chronicle
2-9-07

Tree of Smoke
By Denis Johnson
FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX; 614 PAGES; $27

"Once upon a time there was a war." This statement comes late in Denis Johnson's tour de force of a novel, "Tree of Smoke," and indicates much of the misguided storybook romanticism at the heart of many world conflicts. A couple of pages later a more stoical atmosphere pervades when the same character states, "There was once a war in Asia that had among its tragedies the fact that it followed World War II, a modern war that had somehow managed to retain or revive some of the glories and romances of earlier wars. This Asian war however failed to give any romances outside of hellish myths." Spoken like a true warrior, one might say, because wars are, after all, little more than "hellish myths." But to say that belies the greater truth that men (and now more frequently women) seek out wars to fulfill the innate needs of ambition, adventure, and, of course, romance.

William "Skip" Sands writes those lines in a letter at a time when he knows that his own adventure is quickly coming to an end. Skip, the cornerstone in the novel's large cast of characters, is an inexperienced CIA operative under the wing of his famous uncle, Francis Xavier Sands (better known as "the Colonel"), who would like to be the next James Bond but is more like a paralyzed and stagnant version of Alden Pyle, Graham Greene's infamously deluded "quiet American."

Skip is an outsider among an army of outsiders, and through much of "Tree of Smoke" he is the morally righteous yet naive man through whom we view an increasingly chaotic world - a world the United States feels obliged to put back into its own version of order. But this book and the world in and outside of it are much bigger than Skip, and in the end "Tree of Smoke" is about many countries, both real and mythic, and three families, two American and one Vietnamese, with their own conflicts and betrayals to contend with.

The novel starts in 1963 with John F. Kennedy's assassination and covers a period of 20 years, moving among settings in the Philippines, the United States and Malaysia. But the bulk of the story is centered in an increasingly surreal and vividly portrayed Vietnam. Apart from the Sands clan, there is also the story of brothers Bill and James, who represent the perspective of the average military recruit, and the extended Nguyen family, who come to experience better than anyone the fractious dichotomies tearing their country apart.

In an opening scene that symbolizes much of the heartbreak summoned in the novel, Bill Houston shoots a monkey and then regrets the utter pointlessness of his deed. It is a tiny moment involving a relatively minor character, but it has significant reverberations throughout the work. Similarly, on his first field assignment in the Philippines, Skip is an unwitting accomplice to the assassination of a guilt-racked but probably innocent priest who supposedly ran guns to communist rebels. Long before these characters step foot in Vietnam or return home to an indifferent nation, there is a karmic debt to pay, and the price exacted is nothing less than one's soul. This is the price paid by a legion of Judases who are aware of their deeds but cannot seem to find the right rope to hang themselves with.

Once in Vietnam the grand game heats up as the Colonel, a hybrid of poet-warrior intellect and John Wayne anti-communist bluster, creates a renegade psychological-operations fiefdom in the field and tries to set in motion a double-spy mission known as Tree of Smoke to feed misinformation to the enemy. In league, at least at first, with the Colonel is Nguyen Hoa, who sees this as an opportunity to save his family from the ravages of war. Hoa enlists into the game a childhood friend, Trung Than, who had left for the North in search of communist ideals but has returned disillusioned. Meanwhile, Skip is sequestered at a villa in the countryside with not much to do but contemplate the discarded musings of a dead French doctor who resided there before he met a nasty end. Our crew of spooks here is interested in more than just blow guns, false identities and raw data (of which there is plenty to go around); they are driven to get under the skin of this world they have so carelessly dropped into - or as the Colonel puts it, their real mission is "penetrating the myth of the land."

"Tree of Smoke" is a distinctly literary type of spy novel and political thriller, owing more to John le Carré and the Bible (from which it draws its name) than to Ian Fleming and "The Bourne Identity." Plenty of space is afforded to rumination and soul-searching, but Johnson is smart enough to recognize that something like the Tet Offensive can judiciously move along the pace: There is a time to dwell on the mythology of a place and then a time to hit the deck.

As interagency squabbles and intrigue mount, the Colonel and his crew become increasingly isolated, and an efficient yet philosophical German assassin comes into play, threatening their whole operation. Skip is accused by his uncle of betrayal, and then the Colonel dies - or does he? This is one of many compelling and unanswered mysteries at the novel's core. In the meantime, the Houston brothers deal with a less glamorous world, with Bill returning to a home and country that offer no promise and James going straight into the beast of war. When most of the characters depart from Vietnam in 1970, the narrative jumps forward 13 years and lets us know that the residual effects of this war will be long lasting.

There is so much going on in "Tree of Smoke," and so many levels of symbolism, that it is hard to do the story justice here. There are several other main characters of profound depth, such as the Colonel's sidekick, Jimmy Storm, who practically steals the show with his outlandish banter, and who comes closest to a Conradian experience in the heart of darkness. Also, easily lost in the shuffle of all these men, is Kathy Jones, the only woman with a clear voice in the narrative, who is viewed mostly as "crazy" by her sometimes lover Skip, but who ultimately makes the reader realize that it is often women who are the main victims of war, as well as its healers. Fortunately, Kathy gets the last word and offers much-needed relief.

It will be interesting to see how readers respond to Johnson's novel. Stylistically, it ranges from Hemingwayesque straightforward simplicity to Proustian narrative complexity and descriptive splendor. Johnson brings his talents as a poet to bear, especially when describing the jungles and cities of Asia. But will readers seeking a "thriller" in this text be put off by its literary demands? It will also be interesting to see how more progressive-minded readers will react to a narrative that displays much sympathy toward characters who adamantly believed in the Vietnam War, even while they recognized the futility of it.

In our current world, the comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq were initially tiptoed around, and then bludgeoned beyond recognition, but maybe it's the differences that matter more. In Vietnam, there was for a time at least, true or false, some leftover ideals from World War II that guided the warrior and the nation. But today, the ideals come as sound bites manufactured with the intent of marketing a war to a nation that has lost much of its mythic sense of purpose.

David Hellman is an associate librarian and the collection development coordinator at San Francisco State University.

Boston Globe
September 2, 2007

The things they carried
Denis Johnson's novel of Vietnam weighs the burdens of delusion and faith
By Gail Caldwell

Tree of Smoke
By Denis Johnson
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 614 pp., $27

Denis Johnson's apocalyptic, doom-and-grace-ridden Vietnam novel has a lot of fire in its belly, though even that may not be enough to justify its 600-plus pages. It's a river trip back down into the heart of darkness that belongs to every war, but was Vietnam writ in Day-Glo script, and the Mistah Kurtz here is an old patriot gone off the grid - a CIA Psy Ops cowboy known as the Colonel, who subsists mostly on conspiracy theories, memories of old football games, and Bushmills whiskey. He's the half-reluctant star power of "Tree of Smoke" (which boasts a handful of competing characters) because he's just so damn crazy and charismatic - there have been men like him in every war, and if you're lucky you never knew them. Not so fortunate is his nephew, Skip Sands - a sweet kid from the equally peaceable kingdom of Clements, Kan., who adores the Colonel so unwaveringly that, when asked by a CIA recruiter why he wants to join the Agency, he simply replies: "Because my uncle says he wants me as a colleague." That's the sort of loyalty that begets victory as well as treason, and by the end of "Tree of Smoke," Skip has proved himself capable of both. "There is one God, and many administrations," the Colonel is fond of quoting; it's telling that Skip takes this as earnest instruction about how to serve.

If Johnson has a signature theme throughout his work, it's a kind of quasi-mystical redemption on the other side of the abyss; his gorgeous prose and willingness to go deep have led the way through the scarily lightless corridors of his fiction. He has often seemed like a Robert Stone acolyte - his first novel, "Angels," was a tip of the hat to Stone's "Hall of Mirrors" - and "Tree of Smoke" reminds us of that connection: With its sad-sack priests and half-mad missionary nurses, its war-torn dialogue invoking Marcus Aurelius, it has the bulletproof ironic backbone of Stone's "A Flag for Sunrise," and it knowingly owes its heart to Graham Greene. But for sheer size and scope and determination, the novel is like nothing Johnson has done before.

The title of "Tree of Smoke" is from Scripture, and refers in part here to the vast map of information and possibility the Colonel keeps about the war - a cache of delusional theory that Skip has been indexing for his uncle for years. The dramatic tension of the novel belongs to this folie à deux. The Colonel is trying to run a double agent named Trung, a VC who has become disillusioned with the Marxist-Leninist strictures of the North Vietnamese; having proved himself complicit by staying silent during an off-the-books assassination, Skip spends half his time languishing at a hidden villa, waiting for further instruction. Given his virginal assumptions about God and country, it's fitting that Skip falls into a wartime liaison with Kathy Jones, a Seventh-day Adventist nurse whose husband's remains have just been found - theirs is the perfect mix of lust and despair, framing the tropical circle of hell to which they've both become accustomed.

But because the Vietnam War itself was a mass of conflagrations, tragedy, and mayhem slugging it out under a starless sky, Johnson has wisely chosen to fling his novel in several directions at once. "Tree of Smoke" unfolds in discrete year-marked chapters from 1963 to 1970, then shifts to a coda from 1983. And his interweaving plot lines move between the sinister-absurd world of the Colonel and Skip and the story of two brothers from Phoenix, Bill and James Houston - Bill an irascible seaman who keeps landing in the brig, James the kid brother who finds within the war a world more horrible and alluring than anything he could have imagined. A wide-eyed 17-year-old who lied to enlist, he volunteers to go into a tunnel, then signs up for long-range reconnaissance - the legendary Lurps - and re-ups for three tours of duty. Johnson has a novelist's affinity for the tough-guy loser - the killer with the broken heart, the fellow who takes a tire iron to a stranger because he neglected to call his mother. That's James Houston, or rather who he might well become, and he's portrayed with such chilling intimacy that you feel you've been inside the heart of a soldier turned inside out by war.

Juxtaposed against the surreal megalomania of the Colonel, James is the foot soldier for the moral no-man's-land of the war: the drunken adrenaline rush of Saigon, the military culture of pranks and sadism and blind retribution. The combat scenes, including those during the Tet offensive, are the brilliantly rendered backdrop for the Colonel's machinations - which inevitably wreak more destruction and misfires than mere ineptitude could ever accomplish. Even faced with the truth about his uncle, Skip realizes that the man is already headed into legend: "drunk, obsolete - absolutely unkillable." Lear of his tiny fiefdom, the Colonel gave up on God long ago, but he still believes in redemption. "I believe we'll wander in the darkness for a good long time," he tells his nephew, "and some of what we do here will never be made right, but we will be forgiven."

Everything in "Tree of Smoke" is there for a reason, even when it feels desultory and too passionately involved with its own meanderings - there are passages and detours on occasion (particularly the Colonel's mad philosophizing) that seem as labyrinthine as those infamous tunnels. But there are also moments of riveting intrigue, particularly a scene involving an exquisitely depicted German assassin. In a novel of this length and span, it's the authorial sensibility that mandates the story, and Johnson's is aptly fitted to the "vampire mausoleum" that was Vietnam: He captures the Machiavellian folly and addictive nightmare of the war as well as its walk off the cliff into darkness. Psy Ops was a netherland accustomed to such leaps, of course, and one of the Colonel's aficionados confirms their position: "We're on the cutting edge of reality itself," he says. "Right where it turns into a dream."

That's the sort of rock 'n' roll hubris that kept us where we shouldn't have been for years, and kept a lot of guys there forever.

Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe

Cleveland Plain Dealer

Denis Johnson's 'Tree of Smoke' mines the darkness of the Vietnam War
Sunday, September 02, 2007
John Repp

"Tree of Smoke" is a Viet nam war novel almost without peer, in which "the abyss is alive" across seven years and more than 600 pages.

Denis Johnson - best known for the short stories in "Jesus' Son" and the reporting in "Seek: Reports From the Edges of America and Beyond" - pays homage to Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and Graham Greene's "The Quiet American." His superb, disorienting book winds up not just equaling them, but bettering everything written about Vietnam save the most sublime passages of Tim O'Brien and Michael Herr.

Beginning the day after the John Kennedy assassination, this strange, gripping story mines what will always and everywhere be true about war, idealism and the lethal foolishness of good intentions.

The novel pivots on a CIA operation code-named "Tree of Smoke" that may exist only in the addled imagination of the Colonel, an alcoholic megalomaniac who haunts the book even when he's onstage, slicing the jugular of a too-noisy captive, say, or wowing his disciples with yet another eloquently demented pep talk.

William "Skip" Sands - the Colonel's nephew and the novel's aptly named protagonist - listens most eagerly. He awaits his first Psy-Ops assignment in the Philippine jungle, fending off boredom, sifting the minutiae of his cartoon idealism and consuming epic quantities of the food, drink and double-talk in which the Colonel and those around him indulge.

As the years unwind, Skip mostly waits and wonders. His rare assignments involve transporting, safeguarding and cataloging the Colonel's cache of "intelligence": footlockers packed with index cards and slips of paper bearing archaic information that goes back to the old man's mercenary days fighting the Japanese in Burma.

Along the way, Skip falls in love - or thinks he has fallen in love - with Kathy Jones, a Canadian missionary and widow who supplies the book's searing coda. Once in South Vietnam, Skip befriends - or thinks he has befriended - his uncle's driver, the man most responsible for the covert operation's only "success": the yearslong recruitment of a disenchanted Viet Cong who waits to be sent out on a double-agent mission. This task may - or may not - be the reason the "Tree of Smoke" exists.

Ambiguity permeates this novel. Conventions of plot and lead character are violated - Skip Sands disappears for more than a third of the book. Almost a dozen others spin substories, each told in a distinct prose style. The sections featuring Vietnamese are particularly impressive, Saigon's pungent chaos growing vivid to the point of hallucination. And Johnson devotes some of the most gorgeous and desolate writing in the book to a fellow named James Houston, who escapes a marginal Arizona upbringing only to spend three combat tours so far inside the heart of darkness he achieves a horrific enlightenment.

Though full of action, drama and significance, these subplots don't really develop or resolve, despite their scrupulous architecture. Rather than move forward, characters sink down, no matter how "good" or "bad" their intent or action.

In Kathy Jones' words, the American soldiers "threw hand grenades through doorways and blew the arms and legs off ignorant farmers, they rescued puppies from starvation and smuggled them home to Mississippi in their shirts, they burned down whole villages and raped young girls, they stole medicines by the jeepload to save the lives of orphans."

The fierce, lucid detachment of "Tree of Smoke" would make Soren Kierkegaard proud. Johnson, a poet and novelist who lives in northern Idaho, has written the best work of his career, an existential tour de force.

Everyone in this book bears "at the very center of his eyes a terrified loneliness," and no one achieves redemption.

Except, perhaps, those privileged to read this story.

Repp is a critic and poet in Erie, Pa.

New York Times
September 2, 2007
 

The Revelator
By JIM LEWIS

TREE OF SMOKE

By Denis Johnson.

614 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.

Good morning and please listen to me: Denis Johnson is a true American artist, and “Tree of Smoke” is a tremendous book, a strange entertainment, very long but very fast, a great whirly ride that starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder, loops unpredictably out and around, and then lurches down so suddenly at the very end that it will make your stomach flop. It comes with the armor and accoutrements of a Major Novel: big historical theme (Vietnam), semi-mythical cultural institution (military intelligence), long time span (1963-70, with a coda set in 1983) and unreasonable length (614 pages), all of which would be off-putting if this were not, in fact, a major novel, and if Johnson’s last big book hadn’t been the small collection of eccentric and addictive short stories called “Jesus’ Son” (1992). “Tree of Smoke” is a soulful book, even a numinous one (it’s dedicated “Again for H.P.” and I’ll bet you a bundle that stands for “higher power”), and it ought to secure Johnson’s status as a revelator for this still new century — a prediction I voice confidently but reluctantly, and with a little disappointment and dismay.

Reluctantly, because Johnson has always been an elusive figure, one of the last of the marginal masters. He’s not a recluse, but he’s not out humping his ego, either: I’ve never read an interview with him (though I haven’t looked very hard), or seen a picture of him that wasn’t on one of his book jackets. More important, it has often seemed as if the books themselves — there have been six novels, a book of short stories and one of plays, three volumes of poetry and a collection of journalism — have bloomed spontaneously from the secret fissures that crisscross Americana: jail cells, bad neighborhoods, bus stations, cheap frame houses in the fields beyond the last streetlight. They’re full of deprived souls in monstrous situations, hapless pilgrims on their way to their next disaster. But unlike most books about the dispossessed, they’re original (how strange it feels to use that word these days, but it fits), and what’s more, deliriously beautiful — ravishing, painful; as desolate as Dostoyevsky, as passionate and terrifying as Edgar Allan Poe.

Johnson’s standing, then, is ideal for a writer today: ample respect from his colleagues and peers, a bit of support from institutions and a large following that has nonetheless left him vaguely outside of things. “Tree of Smoke” is a massive thing and something like a masterpiece; it’s the product of an extraordinary writer in full stride. But I can’t help hoping that it leaves his status unchanged. We don’t need any more novelist-performers or novelist-pundits or novelist-narcissists, but we very badly need more novelists who can write this well.

As for this particular novel, it’s typically counterintuitive. For one thing, it’s about the Vietnam War, and who would have thought we needed another book about that fiasco? For another, it co-stars a character named Bill Houston, who carried Johnson’s first novel, “Angels” (1983), and met a bad end. Reading about his prehistory in the Navy is a disturbing experience for anyone who’s read the earlier book, though it’ll mean nothing in particular to those who haven’t.

Stranger still, “Tree of Smoke” doesn’t feel like a Denis Johnson novel, not at first, anyway. He has a fondness for the oracular mode, and he often pitches his rhetoric in a register unavailable to most contemporary writers: Isaiah among the lumpenproletariat. It’s his natural form of address, but it can sometimes be exhausting. An earlier novel, “Already Dead” (1997), started out wild and ended, 435 pages later, unhinged. “Tree of Smoke” is cannier: it begins like a very good novel by someone else, and by the time you realize how demanding it has become, it’s too late.

Sentences like this start flashing past: “She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her.” What a thing to say, but the book is moving on. Two drunken soldiers, one of them an amputee, have a long, inane conversation, during which the disabled one announces, “My invisible foot hurts.” Later, the other soldier weeps “like a barking dog.” The lines roll like billiard balls with weird English on them, they spin and skid, often just after their last comma, and then they plunge into their pockets with a crack.

But I haven’t told you what the thing is about yet. It’s mostly about a man named Skip Sands, a novice in the C.I.A, who begins the book as a young man in 1965, and makes it almost to the end, though by then it’s 1983 and he’s ancient; and his uncle, a Kurtz-like character who starts a little operation of his own, and then dies so ridiculously that no one can believe he’s actually dead; and the Houston brothers, Bill and James, who serve their country and then wander, angry and free, back to Nothing-to-Do, Arizona; and two Vietnamese military men, one from the South and one from the North, who flip this way and that; and another intelligence officer named Storm, who carries the book like the last man in a relay race, delivering it at the finish to a Canadian woman named Kathy, a Seventh-Day Adventist and aid worker, who has encompassed the whole story, who winds up bearing much of the book’s considerable grief, and who gets, as she deserves, its final pages to mourn.

Many of the themes from Johnson’s earlier books are recapitulated here, large and small: the American unleashed on the world and the world rendered opaque to Americans; tenderness as unexpected swerve and thuggishness as uninflected animus; death as the palm at the end of the mind. He has odd stylistic quirks — a superstition, for example, about proper names. (Bill Houston, in “Angels,” is rarely called anything but Bill Houston, though here he occasionally goes by just plain Bill; the narrator of “Jesus’ Son” is anonymous but for a raunchy nickname; a figure in his novel “Fiskadoro” is named “________”; and “Tree of Smoke” includes a minor character who refuses to be called anything but Black Man.)

Yes, there are a few things I wish Johnson had done differently. He puts more hardware on display here (guns, airplanes, intelligence equipage) than I needed to see, and more rock ’n’ roll military dialogue than I needed to hear. And he can occasionally overindulge in significance: a longish journey, at the end of “Tree of Smoke,” left me with the uneasy sense that he can’t tell the difference between Joseph Conrad, who was a genius, and Joseph Campbell, who was not. So it’s not a perfect book; but then, a perfect book would be perfectly safe, and I don’t have time for that.

I spent a long time reading “Tree of Smoke,” and as I neared the end I found myself wishing it were longer. The grief I mentioned above: there are very few writers today who can get that on the page, and our literature is tepid without it. Epiphanies occur in almost every book, but a credible apocalypse is much harder to find. And a little redemption in the last chapter is so common that it’s barely noticeable; but how many books can really convey what it means to be lost, let alone, as this one does, what it might mean to be found?

Jim Lewis’s most recent novel is “The King Is Dead.” He lives in Austin, Tex

New York Times
August 31, 2007

Books of The Times
In Vietnam: Stars and Stripes, and Innocence Undone
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

TREE OF SMOKE
By Denis Johnson
614 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.
 

Denis Johnson’s wildly ambitious new novel, “Tree of Smoke,” reads like a whacked-out, hallucinogenic variation on such whacked-out, hallucinogenic Vietnam classics as Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” Michael Herr’s “Dispatches,” Robert Stone’s “Dog Soldiers” and Stephen Wright’s “Meditations in Green.” It features a central character who comes to see himself as a combination of the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and another who comes across as a latter-day version of Kurtz in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”

What’s amazing is that Mr. Johnson somehow manages to take these derivative elements and turn them into something highly original — and potent. Though “Tree of Smoke” is hobbled by a plot that starts and stops and lurches wildly about, it’s a powerful story about the American experience in Vietnam, with unsettling echoes of the current American experience in Iraq. It is a story about bad intelligence and military screw-ups and people who have lost their way, a story like so many of Mr. Johnson’s earlier novels, about Americans in purgatory, waiting impatiently, even expectantly, for the coming apocalypse.

This has been Mr. Johnson’s preoccupation throughout his career, from early, incantatory books like “Angels” and “Fiskadoro” through later, tendentious works like “Already Dead.” Whether the backdrop is a futuristic United States (“Fiskadoro”), Nicaragua in the 1980s (“The Stars at Noon”), or, in the case of this latest novel, Vietnam in the 1960s, he has consistently promoted a vision of America as a country in the grip of misplaced dreams and outright delusions, intent on exporting its madness abroad. His cast of characters, too, is similar from book to book: an alarming spectrum of madmen and deadbeats and drifters — the lost, the damned and the dispossessed — all yearning for salvation or release.

In “Tree of Smoke,” Skip Sands initially seems like a very different sort of Johnsonian hero. Skip is young, naïve and eager to prove himself as a C.I.A. operative. He is convinced that the United States is going to defeat the Communists in Vietnam and wants to be there for that victory. And he hopes to emulate his larger-than-life uncle, Col. Francis Sands, a Flying Tiger who escaped from the Japanese during World War II and made a swaggering legend of himself.

Most of all, Skip believes in the goodness and promise of America with boyish innocence and ardor: “In the Stars and Stripes,” Mr. Johnson writes, “all the passions of his life coalesced to produce the ache with which he loved the United States of America — with which he loved the dirty, plain, honest faces of G.I.’s in the photographs of World War II, with which he loved the sheets of rain rippling across the green playing field toward the end of the school year, with which he cherished the sense-memories of the summers of his childhood.”

Skip’s innocence, however, is tarnished when he witnesses the agency’s brutal assassination of a priest (falsely suspected of running guns) in the Philippines, and in Vietnam he quickly becomes lost in the wilderness of mirrors created by his fellow intelligence officers. He is drawn willy-nilly into a complicated plot involving a double agent — a Vietcong sympathizer, who apparently agrees to carry out a mission for the Americans — and finds himself increasingly unable to distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys, the earnest and the duplicitous, the idealistic and the mercenary.

As for Skip’s mentor, the colonel, he too loses his way or, rather, comes to believe that his superiors have lost their way. In a secret memo he suggests that the intelligence functions of the agency are being perverted, that they are being used to “provide rationalizations for policy,” much the way flawed intelligence was used, in the walk-up to the Iraq war, to provide a rationale for invasion.

Eventually, he concocts an elaborate plan to test his hypotheses, a plan that will make him the target of some of his own colleagues. For that matter, the colonel and Skip both learn that they can trust no one, least of all those who are supposedly their comrades-in-arms in the cold war.

Mr. Johnson intercuts the stories of Skip and the colonel with those of half a dozen other people caught up in the war. There’s James Houston, a young drifter who has followed his brother into the military and finds himself in the midst of a war with no rules, a war in which the heat and the jungle and the confusions of fighting a guerrilla enemy lead to acts of startling brutality and horror. There’s Kathy Jones, a nurse who winds up in Vietnam after her husband, a missionary, is killed, and who has a brief, seemingly desultory, affair with Skip. And there’s Hao, a Vietnamese functionary, who dreams of a better life in Singapore or the United States, and uses his boyhood friendship with a member of the Vietcong to try to advance his interests with the Americans.

Mr. Johnson’s orchestration of these characters’ intersecting lives is often graceless — as his last couple of novels have demonstrated, plotting has never been one of his strengths — and he has an unfortunate tendency to embroider their adventures with lots of portentous philosophizing about good and evil and religious faith. His heat-seeking eye for detail and his ability to render those observations in hot, tactile prose, however, immerse us so thoroughly in the fetid world of the war and the even more noxious world of espionage that they effectively erase the book’s occasional longueurs.

Mr. Johnson not only succeeds in conjuring the anomalous, hallucinatory aura of the Vietnam War as authoritatively as Stephen Wright or Francis Ford Coppola, but he also shows its fallout on his characters with harrowing emotional precision. He has written a flawed but deeply resonant novel that is bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war.

Los Angeles Times

'Tree of Smoke' by Denis Johnson
An epic of sin and redemption set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War.
By David L. Ulin

September 2, 2007

Tree of Smoke

A Novel

Denis Johnson

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 614 pp., $27

At the end of Denis Johnson's 1983 novel, "Angels," a drifter named Bill Houston is led to the Arizona gas chamber, where he will die for having murdered a bank guard in a botched robbery. Bill is ex-Navy, a former sailor who never quite fit back into the civilian world. And yet, Johnson wants us to realize, even an existence this marginal comes bestowed with its own odd sort of grace.

"He was in the middle of taking the last breath of his life before he realized he was taking it," Johnson writes. "But it was all right. Boom! Unbelievable! And another coming? How many of these things do you mean to give away? He got right in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn't going to come. That's it. That's the last. He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being."

Bill is, in many ways, a quintessential Johnson figure, a three-dimensional embodiment of the tension that animates nearly all the author's writing: the tricky pull between the spiritual and the physical, the sacred and the profane. He's not bad at heart, not exactly; perhaps a more accurate way of putting it is that standard considerations of good and evil do not apply.

For Johnson, the key is to think in terms of redemption, resurrection even, to look for the small flickers of awareness or transcendence that pierce the illusory distractions of the world. This is not the stuff of homilies, of easy faith or of a forgiving, tender-hearted god. "What a pair of lungs!" Johnson's visionary (or is he only drug-afflicted?) narrator exclaims, describing a woman's wail of grief in his best known (and, I think, finest) book, the 1992 story collection "Jesus' Son." "She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere."

This is writing that takes us right up to the edge and, indeed, beyond it, that casts us past the boundaries of ourselves. It's no coincidence that in Johnson's 1997 novel "Already Dead" (subtitled "A California Gothic"), a character named Carl Van Ness becomes convinced that his failed suicide attempts are actually successful; he is not so much surviving as cycling through a series of parallel lifetimes, parallel souls.

Johnson's new novel, "Tree of Smoke," his first book of fiction since 2000's "The Name of the World," is very much a saga trafficking in resurrection; it brings Bill Houston back to life. That's not to say it's other-worldly: The Houston we meet here is not a ghost but, rather, a prior incarnation, the Navy man from whom the character in "Angels" will emerge. He's not the centerpiece of the novel either but more a portal, a point of entry, a familiar face in an amorphous world.

Taking place in Southeast Asia -- Vietnam mostly -- during the period from 1963 to 1970, "Tree of Smoke" is a massive patchwork of people and stories that overlap and drift apart. Here, Johnson means to marry his sensibility to a more concrete political vision, using the war, and our chimerical objectives, as a way to address the unknowability of experience in the largest sense.

"What is this universe to God?" a Vietnamese priest wonders partway through the novel. "Is it a drama? Is it a dream? Perhaps a nightmare?" Such questions coalesce around the elusive Tree of Smoke, an intelligence operation involving a Viet Cong double agent, which is named for a passage in the Bible. "There shall be blood and fire and palm trees of smoke -- from Joel, wasn't it?" Johnson writes. "Incredible how the English came back. And the scripture, too, back from the darkness. Joel, yes, the second chapter, usually translated 'pillars of smoke,' but the original Hebrew said 'palm trees of smoke.' "

That's an essential passage, with its suggestion that language, meaning, even Holy Writ, are entirely conditional, that understanding is not available to us. All we have are our perceptions, which are flawed, uncertain, expressive of our failings and desires more than an accurate representation of what we see. To highlight this, Johnson immerses us in the story of CIA agent Skip Sands, nephew to Col. Francis Sands, himself a rogue intelligence officer operating in a territory of his own design. Moving back and forth from these characters to Bill Houston and his soldier brother James, Johnson attempts to offer a kaleidoscopic overview of a landscape in which necessity has boiled everything down to its essence, in which morality is overridden by survival and reality blurs into dream.

The people here are unmoored, ethically ambivalent, lost in the cosmos, detached from history, God, the world. And yet, their disassociation exposes them to a strange deliverance, albeit not in any way we might expect. "War is ninety percent myth anyway, isn't it?" the colonel asks Skip. "In order to prosecute our own wars we raise them to the level of human sacrifice, don't we, and we constantly invoke our God. It's got to be about something bigger than dying, or we'd all turn deserter. I think we need to be much more conscious of that. I think we need to be invoking the other fellow's gods too."

What Johnson's getting at is a metaphysics of the battlefield, a psychic reckoning with Vietnam. Surprisingly, however, this is where "Tree of Smoke" breaks down. Part of the problem is, of course, the war itself, which has been portrayed and dissected so thoroughly that even those of us with no direct experience of it come to this novel with a store of images and memories embedded in our brains. Indeed, one extended sequence involving tunnel rats named Joker and Cowboy is reminiscent of "Full Metal Jacket," while other moments echo the hallucinatory intensity of Robert Stone's novel "Dog Soldiers" or the film "Apocalypse Now."

Why write about Vietnam at this point in history? Is there anything else that needs to be said? On the one hand, it appears, Johnson wants to use the war to comment on our involvement in Iraq -- "Shock and despair," he writes, in one telling reference -- but ultimately, that seems not ambiguous enough. No, for Johnson, Vietnam may best be read as an elaborate metaphor, less geopolitical than geo-spiritual, a zone in which we lost not just our innocence but our souls. That's a classic Johnson setup, but as "Tree of Smoke" progresses, it gets too diffuse, too sprawling, until we ourselves grow disconnected, detached, lost.

It's not that the book lacks a certain resolution; resolution, Johnson recognizes, is just another construct, and besides, we know what happens to Bill Houston anyway. More to the point, it's that the people here cannot collapse the distance between their inner and outer lives. Yes, they're tormented by the exigencies of combat, but Johnson has made a career of writing about people in extreme situations, and he excels at their complexities of character. "Tree of Smoke," however, lacks that laser sharpness, that ability to parse the distinctions between transcendence and despair. It never brings us close enough to believe that these characters matter, that there is something fundamental -- lives, souls, the question of deliverance -- at stake.

In some sense, you have to wonder if that's a consequence of the desire to produce an epic. "Tree of Smoke" is 614 pages long, and Johnson reportedly worked on it for two decades, which suggests an existential dilemma of its own. Yet in the end this is too easy, also; it's not the book's length that is the trouble but its approach.

"The jungle itself screamed like a mosque," Johnson writes late in the novel, describing a staged ritual in which a former psy-ops sergeant named Jimmy Storm plays a symbolic sacrifice. "Storm lay naked on his back and watched the upward-rushing mist and smoke in the colossal firelight and waited for the clear light, for the peaceful deities, the face of the father-mother, the light from the six worlds, the dawning of hell's smoky light and the white light of the second god, the hungry ghosts wandering in ravenous desire, the gods of knowledge and the wrathful gods, the judgment of the lord of death before the mirror of karma, the punishments of the demons, and the flight to refuge in the cave of the womb that would bear him back into this world."

It's beautiful writing: With Johnson, the writing is always beautiful. Still, for all that it hints at a reality in which physics and metaphysics blend together and we are transfigured by their proximity, mostly what we get here is a sense of being on the outside, which -- in Johnson's universe, anyway -- has never been enough. *

david.ulin@latimes.com

David L. Ulin is book editor of The Times.

THE FATHER OF ALL THINGS - A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam by By Tom Bissell, Illustrated. 407 pp. Pantheon Books. $25.

Review by Marc Leepson in Washington Post

Review by Patricia Conover in SF Chronicle

Tom Bissell's wandering journey through Vietnam, "The Father of All Things," within the context of the Vietnam War and his unresolved relationship with his father, does not lead to an epiphany, nor a holy grail. Instead, Bissell's account, in tandem with his father's recollections, offers a fresh and comprehensive look at the Vietnam era.
In 1967, after being wounded in Vietnam, Capt. John Bissell resigned his Marine commission and moved his young bride to his hometown of Escanaba, Mich. The younger Bissell imagines his father's thoughts as he watches televised accounts of Saigon's fall. At the same time, the marriage between a traumatized John and his wife, Muff, the author's mother, is unraveling. John is incapable of sharing his deepest feelings with her and finds solace in alcohol:

"Of course you know that if you keep behaving this way you are going to lose Muff forever ... You honestly don't know what you would do, or where you would be, without her. ... Yet running contiguous to this certainty are rivers of far inkier thought. They flow through the black, treeless landscape of your mind and feed into your heart, changing its electricity, coarsening it ... And your mouth is so dry. You need a drink. You pacify yourself by thinking of that drink, the way the scotch-soaked slivers of ice will melt against your teeth." It is in passages like this the author finds his most expressive voice.

In other places Bissell defines the reasons we continually retrace our most difficult moments:

"Why do disasters demand such constant revisitation? Perhaps the first human being to delineate yesterday from today was not acting upon any natural observation but was instead seeking to commemorate some previously unthinkable event. Where were you when? Do you remember? We employ so many signifiers to hallow our larger, shared disasters that memory itself collapses beneath the weight. I was there. I remember. But all one truly remembers of most disasters is having forgotten what existence was like before they occurred. ...

"On April 29th, 1975, my father was losing something of himself. He was losing what was at that time possibly the largest part of himself. This was his certainty that what he had suffered in Vietnam was necessary. In other words, he was losing his past and future all at once. He would lose much more. We all would. We would lose so much we would forget, perhaps, what it was we had lost."

In the book's second part, as father and son traverse Vietnam, the author continuously prods John Bissell to talk about his memories. This veteran is not a particularly revealing person. Pulling stories out of him is hard work, and it shows. At the same time, the son occasionally mines some gems, as in this exchange with a former South Vietnamese soldier.

" 'The bad memories,' my father said, 'like this.' He then pantomimed taking his brain out of his head, slipped the imaginary brain into his shirt pocket, and slyly patted it."

Bissell's extensive description of the grisly My Lai massacre and its aftermath, the harrowing attempted evacuation of Saigon and Da Nang, and the atrocities committed by both sides during the course of the war, offer proof of his astonishing skill. The reader desperately wishes to look away from the heartbreaking narrative of death and destruction, but Bissell's powerful writing forces one to open one's eyes and take in the enormity of the moral abyss.

Similarities to the war in Iraq can be found on every page, but Bissell does not spell them out. Simply put, technological advances do not assure victory, and leaders do not always tell the truth, no matter which side they are on. The line between combatants and civilians is consistently blurred.

After a visit to the War Remnants Museum in Saigon, Bissell describes a display that honors all the journalists killed in wartime, especially relevant at this moment in time. He also generously pays tribute to fellow writers on Vietnam: Philip Caputo, Tim O'Brien, Neil Sheehan and Tobias Wolff, among others.

Bissell reads so much about the Vietnam War that he seems to know more about it than his father.

" 'I read somewhere,' I told my father, 'that the National Liberation Front was so effective using booby traps because they knew which trails you'd take. They knew American soldiers would always take the easiest, driest-looking path.'

" 'I'm sorry to say,' my father admitted, 'that what you read is probably true.' "

In his author's notes, he asks, "More than thirty thousand books on Vietnam are currently in print. Why another?" The answer is not difficult. Bissell looks at the war through the lens of a generation not yet born when America pulled out of Vietnam. He scrutinizes the oft-repeated historical facts and holds them up to the light, illuminating them in the process. The complexities inherent in the Vietnam War are difficult to understand. And, although Bissell obviously loves his father, their relationship is fraught with sadness and uncertainty. "The Father of All Things" displays the kind of hard-won comprehension and insight that develops only over time and with much thought. In a nation's history, and a family's saga, this understanding is both painful and necessary.

Patricia Conover is a writer and editor who lives in Paris.

Review by Daniel Ford in Wall Street Journal

Vietnam Revisited
An antiwar son, a Marine father. Family quagmire, anyone?

When Tom Bissell pondered his father's war, having heard about it in family conversation over the years, the Vietnam conflict seemed the stuff of poetry: "For all its dreads," as the younger man imagines service there, "in Vietnam you never lost the simple human awareness of being alive. It was a young man's land, covered in a dew of terrifying possibility."

But when Mr. Bissell and his father, John, actually tour Vietnam in 2003 at the behest of Harper's magazine, poetry gives way to outrage. The war was an atrocity! Bissell Jr. simply cannot get over the crimes of his own country, especially as he has gleaned them from his pre-trip research and a searing visit to the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. Since he shares some of his father's genes, he seems to worry that he shares some of the guilt as well.

"The Father of All Things" purports to be a meditative travelogue and a portrait of father-son bonding. But politics is nearly everywhere in the book, intruding on the past. One of the rare unpolitical moments comes when Tom asks his father if he had a Marine Corps nickname. Yes: "Nice Guy." It was earned when Bissell Sr. stopped to compensate a Vietnam peasant for a water buffalo, accidentally killed by his patrol, while a general overhead in a helicopter demanded that the Marines keep moving. His son seems astonished by the paradox of kindness in the killing fields. Yet such moments are part of every war, including Vietnam's, as I saw during my own months as a reporter there. For the most part, American soldiers are kind.

Tom and John Bissell in Vietnam in 2003. Inset: Bissell Sr., Marine officer candidate, in Quantico, Va., 1964. Mr. Bissell has less difficulty believing his own country's crimes, of course: They were, by his reckoning, continual, awful and unforgivable -- and we're repeating them today in Iraq! He doesn't make the connection explicitly; instead, when he tallies Lyndon Johnson's mendacities, for instance, Mr. Bissell likens them to those of "another president," not named. For the sins of Vietnam he especially blames LBJ adviser Walt Rostow and Nixon adviser Henry Kissinger -- largely, it seems, because they never apologized for their crimes. "A disgustingly evasive book," the bibliography says of Mr. Kissinger's "Ending the Vietnam War," "by a thoroughly disgusting statesman." Well, at least we know where our chronicler stands.

Mr. Bissell blames fools as well as criminals for Vietnam, such as the Washington bureaucrat who said that he believed himself better off without military experience, since the omission freed him to think creatively. I take Mr. Bissell's point. But what is true for bureaucrats is also true for reporters: Some first-hand knowledge really does come in handy. The lack of it leads, for instance, to Mr. Bissell's thinking that U.S. Special Forces conducted "unconditional warfare" in Vietnam, when their specialty was unconventional warfare. Does it make a difference? I think so.

In the end, I found myself liking the father more and the son less. Mr. Bissell writes well, and he has read widely, from Bernard Fall's prescient "Street Without Joy" to David Butler's affecting "The Fall of Saigon." And he did go to the trouble of walking the ground, even if it was long after the shooting stopped. But Mr. Bissell's disgust is so pervasive that I wearied of it. Wasn't there one decent human being in the U.S. war effort -- military or civilian, Democrat or Republican, in Saigon or Washington? Was every motive sinister? Was nobody ever simply mistaken? Most important: Was there no cause worth fighting for? Mr. Bissell could have spoken to a few of the Vietnamese boat people who fled the communists after the war. They might have shown him a different perspective.

The Bissells' visit to Hue -- the city near the Demilitarized Zone where, during the 1968 Tet offensive, the U.S. Marines won the battle but lost their country's support -- captures the flavor of "The Father of All Things." When the two men arrive at the Citadel, an imperial palace complex, Bissell Sr. pronounces the enclave "neat." That's not good enough for Bissell Jr., who prods his father throughout the trip for therapeutic exchanges that never come.

At Hue, Bissell Jr. chides his father ("Come on, 'Neat'?") and then launches into a description of how the French, who once ruled Vietnam, found it "humbling" that Vietnamese culture was "hundreds of years older than French culture." Thus, Bissell Jr. says, the French were willing to negotiate once war started. He asks his father repeatedly whether he is "bitter" that the Marines didn't train him in cultural sensitivity. Bissell Sr. won't confess to bitterness on that score, but after sucking his teeth and thinking a bit, he allows that the U.S. could have accomplished a lot with humanitarian aid in rural areas if we had understood the country better.

The author might want to improve his own grasp of Vietnamese culture: He tells us that the Citadel is "ancient," but in fact construction on it started in 1804. Besotted with the setting's beauty and supposed antiquity, he finds himself envying the simple pride shown by Hien, their guide. "Soon Hien was no longer leading us. Instead he seemed pleased simply to stand amid the astonishments of such a storied place." Mr. Bissell himself, he confesses, has never felt a similar awe at any of his own country's cultural monuments -- the Lincoln Memorial, say. He asks his father: "Why is that?"

"Because you're an ungrateful little prick," replies John (Nice Guy) Bissell.

Mr. Ford is the author of "Flying Tigers: Claire Chennault and His American Volunteers, 1941-1942," forthcoming from HarperCollins

Review by Paul McLeary in LA Times:

It's almost a cliché to say that Americans live under the long shadow of Vietnam. And our engagement in more wars since then, each with its own stories, lessons and tragedies, has only intensified our scratching at the nation's Vietnam wounds, refusing to let them fully heal.

The grip that war holds over discussions of Iraq and Afghanistan no doubt is due, in part, to the fact that most of the men who decided to wage the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq wars — and the pundits and politicians who kick around their views in the opinion pages and on talk shows — came of age during the trauma produced by Vietnam.

But for those born in the 1970s, too young to have any experience with Vietnam save for its cultural fallout, the name has a set of associations different from those held by aging baby boomers, who knew a world, and an America, before the conflict. Journalist and fiction writer Tom Bissell, son of an unhappy Vietnam veteran, is one of those Gen-Xers.

Bissell grew up in a pop culture landscape stacked with ex-'Nam heroes like Chuck Norris' Col. James Braddock, Sylvester Stallone's Rambo and "The A-Team" — even Magnum, P.I., did two tours in Vietnam — whose struggles were defined by their service. The 1980s were full of people like these charismatic walking wounded, who, through a desire to make peace with their wartime experiences, affirmed America's ability to look forward while reliving its past.

For the postwar generation, Bissell writes in "The Father of All Things," "[t]his strange, lost war, simultaneously real and unimaginable, forced us to confront the past before we had any idea of what the past really was. The war made us think theoretically long before we had the vocabulary to do so. Despite its remoteness, the war's aftereffects were inescapably intimate. At every meal Vietnam sat down, invisibly, with our families."

Bissell's father, John, brought the war to the dinner table each night. Unlike those celluloid vets, he wasn't able to find catharsis by fighting his own redemptive, soundtrack-backed war. A Marine captain who had been wounded in combat, John Bissell left Southeast Asia in 1966, married and moved back to upper Michigan to raise two boys in his childhood home. He dealt with his war experiences by drowning in Johnny Walker and Budweiser, which soon led to divorce. The author remembers that on drinking binges, his father would wake him up to tell him stories about the war, which "used to scare the hell out of me." John admits, "I drank, and cried, and drank, and nothing worked."

To understand how and why his father eventually managed to tame his demons, Bissell takes him back to Vietnam — 40 years after he first arrived as a young Marine. Tom has dreamed up the trip to examine how his father's past has colored both their lives, because, as he notes, history is "the arrangement of memory ... an argument with the past." And father and son find a great many things to argue about, including the father's comical belief that his son is a communist and the son's inability to recognize that his father has made peace with the war, however fragile.

Their exchanges, in revealing the chasm between father and son, suggest how war creates two kinds of people: those who lived through it and those who will never understand what it was like to live through it. During the trip, Tom tries, time and again, to get his father to admit that the war isn't finished for him, and the more the father protests that he has come to terms with it, the more the gap between them seems to grow. When they visit the beach where his father first set foot in Vietnam, Bissell tries to get his father to talk. His father asks for a moment, staring at the ocean in confusion and recognition. "This was where the man I knew as my father was born," Bissell writes. "It was as though he were looking upon himself through a bloody veil of memory."

Bissell's strength isn't in writing history, as his extended digressions on the war, although well-researched, show. At times these historical flights seem forced — a way, one suspects, to compensate for a lack of narrative; but as the book goes on, they serve a crucial purpose, intended or not. It's important to remember that for the most part, textbooks and teachers rarely mention Vietnam. (Those of us who were in elementary and high school in the 1980s can attest to this.) The book, therefore, serves as an excellent thumbnail sketch of the major players and significant dates that define the conflict but have been ignored in popular retellings of the war. In this way, John Bissell's role in the great, impersonal sweep of history is placed in context.

As a travel writer, however, Tom Bissell is superb. His descriptions of today's Vietnam are breathtaking and deep, written with a novelist's flair for giving life to the inanimate and the obscure. On a visit to the city of Hue, where the Marines fought a deadly house-to-house campaign eclipsed only by the recent battle for Iraq's Fallouja, he writes: "The omnipresence of the Perfume River gave Hue's streets the busy maritime feeling of long, wide docks.... Large tourist 'dragon boats' painted a cheerfully ugly mixture of blue and yellow and green chugged down the Perfume's center, leaving a wake that looked as though the river were being unzipped."

Given the volume of history and the breadth of the travel writing, there are times when the book seems to pay insufficient attention to the father-son relationship. But their exchanges are always memorable. One comes when they visit the town of Son My, near where the My Lai massacre occurred. "I could have asked, and almost did: 'Did you ever do anything like that?' " Bissell writes. "But I did not ask, because no father should be lightly posed such a question by his son. Because no father should think, even for a moment, that his son believes him capable of such a thing. Because I knew my father was not capable of such a thing. So I was telling myself as we pulled up to Son My."

Sons have always had to tell themselves a great many things about their fathers, those tall, whiskered, larger-than-life figures they aspire to be — and sometimes fear becoming. Perhaps no son ever fully reconciles himself to his father, for good or ill. Bissell's beautifully written book adds a chapter to the rich literature of familial struggle.

In the end, the author finally seems to understand this as the two, just like other fathers and sons have done, become men living in the present, united by a shared past.

Paul McLeary is a writer and critic based in Brooklyn

Review by JOE KLEIN in New York Times:

At the beginning of this fine book, Tom Bissell asks the obvious question: “More than 30,000 books on Vietnam are currently in print. Why another?” He’s certainly facing a challenge. I’ve read a great many books about that godforsaken war and written one (no longer in print, sadly), and the literature of Vietnam, both fiction and non, is flat-out excellent. So why another? “I bring ... only this,” Bissell writes: “I have spent most of my life thinking about it” — and, more to the point, living with it, because his father, John, was a Marine Corps lieutenant who saw combat in Vietnam and, like so many others, brought the war home. “What I could not know about my father because of his experience has always fascinated and troubled me,” Bissell writes. Happily, for father, son and us, Harper’s Magazine agreed to send both Bissells back to Vietnam for a visit, in which much, but not everything, is learned and John Bissell comes to terms with his service, if not entirely with his son. This, then, is a book that combines the virtues of distance and immediacy — the cool perspective that comes from investigating a war that was pretty much over before the author was born and the searing immediacy of being raised by a troubled veteran of that lost war.

Bissell, who has published two previous books, brings more than just a “lifetime of thinking” about Vietnam to his task. He also brings a luminous prose style and, perhaps more important, a clear, fresh eye to events that many of us have allowed to slip into the infuriatingly painful past. He has devised a clever structure for the book, which slides back and forth between the Bissell family story and straightforward narrative accounts of the war that are rigorous and convincing.

Bissell’s view of the war is supple, complex and a relief from the most recent wave of books about Vietnam, which have been military histories with a conservative, revisionist tilt: authors like C. Dale Walton and Lewis Sorley insist that the United States had won the war militarily by 1972, and could have won it politically with more patience and gumption. Bissell acknowledges that the American military successes were real, but argues persuasively that there was no way to rescue the South Vietnamese government. Indeed, the mere fact of American support helped delegitimize the South — a lesson that has more than a little resonance in Iraq today. Most Vietnamese didn’t know very much about Communism or freedom, but they were quite sure they wanted to be reunited under an indigenous government that had gained credibility over 30 years by resisting foreign armies — the Japanese, the French and the Americans. Bissell has no illusions about the brutality of the North Vietnamese, and he reminds us that those Vietnamese who supported us in the South suffered greatly when we left. He breaks off the narrative five times to conduct carefully documented “queries” into vital questions — Was Ho Chi Minh a Stalinist? Why was the government of South Vietnam so corrupt? Why did the United States military and government lie so frequently about the war? What was the Soviet Union’s goal in Vietnam? Could the war have been “won”? His post-baby-boom assessments yield valuable, often surprisingly generous reconsiderations of the key players. In the midst of his inquiry into the lies told by the United States government, he discusses Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and his advice to President Johnson: “McNamara, to his immense credit, stopped lying and then stopped supporting the war altogether. When very few in the U.S. government saw the war’s futility, McNamara did. As he said to Johnson in 1967, ‘the war cannot be won by killing North Vietnamese. It can only be won by protecting the South Vietnamese.’ ” (Another echo of Iraq: McNamara was proposing the same sort of counterinsurgency tactics now being attempted by Gen. David Petraeus in Baghdad.)

Some of Bissell’s most affecting passages come when he melds his family saga with narrative accounts of specific events in Vietnam. He opens the book with a long, haunting section about the last weeks of the war in Vietnam and in his parents’ home on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. As emotionally powerful as this is, there is a slight disconnect here: he is describing events in Vietnam that actually happened (stunning, little-remembered details about the American evacuation, including the story of the last two Americans to die, in John Kerry’s words, “for a mistake”), but the events in Michigan — his father’s drunkenness and isolation, the disintegration of his parents’ marriage — are a semifictional, if plausible, recreation of what Bissell imagines his father to have been like during that time. The disconnect has a purpose, though. It presages the utterly human father-and-son awkwardness at the heart of the book: Bissell is clearly mystified, and daunted, by his father. Even when the two of them go to Vietnam together, Bissell insists on infantilizing himself. On the plane going over, he writes, “what bothered me was the increasingly unsettling sensation of simply being beside my father. Somehow he made me feel physically diminished.” There is an annoying, if purposeful, clash throughout the book between Tom Bissell’s two personas: mature, judicious historian and puerile, needy son — a discomfort reinforced by the fact that Bissell has tape-recorded most of his interactions with his father and their conversations have the unvarnished, rough-edged dysfunctionality of real life. At one point, John Bissell finally begins to vent — really vent — about the war, about how the upper echelons had no idea what was happening to lieutenants like him on the ground:

“ ‘Do you know how many colonels died in combat in World War II? Hundreds. Hundreds. Do you know how many died in combat in Vietnam? Hardly any. ... I never saw a general go out on any patrol — not in a truck, not on foot. ... And when a general does not respect a lieutenant and orders him about summarily, with no idea of the tactical situation, no idea ... well, quite frankly, we began to ignore them.’

“ ‘Dad, I’m going to be honest and say you’re freaking me out a little.’

“ ‘Well, what do you want to talk about? The rights and wrongs of war? I don’t know much about that. I don’t even know that much about war. Except that I was in one, apparently.’ ”

It is a supreme act of authorly self-abnegation, and an utter relief from the solipsistic memoirs that clutter the shelves, that Tom Bissell allows his father to be a far more sympathetic character than he portrays himself to be. After a visit to the Cu Chi tunnels, young Bissell insists on firing an AK-47 at a shooting range the Vietnamese have opened next to the museum, as if unaware that the very sound of the gun would raise horrific memories for his father. “ ‘Now imagine,’ my father piped up, ‘that 20 guys are firing back at you, and people everywhere are screaming.’ ”

It would be wonderful and heartwarming to report that the Bissells eventually have a transcendent moment of father-son bonding, but this is far too honest a book for that. The distance between them diminishes, but it never really evaporates. John Bissell does have an emotional moment where he puts the war to rest, but it is with a South Vietnamese veteran, not with his son, and I won’t ruin it for you by describing it in detail. Tom Bissell seems more frustrated, and incomplete, than his father in the end — which may well be the fate of his generation, and the next generation, of soldiers’ kids. The devastating, messy slog of Bissell’s literary journey reminds us that the answer to his question — “Why another?” — applies not only to books about Vietnam but also to arrogant, futile wars like Vietnam ... and Iraq: Why another? And again, why another?

Joe Klein is Time magazine’s political columnist and the author, most recently, of “Politics Lost.”

NIXON AND MAO: The Week That Changed the World, by Margaret MacMillan. Random House, 406 pp., $27.95.

President Richard Nixon's trip to China in 1972 was an iconic event. A brilliant diplomatic stroke, the trip melted decades of deep freeze between two of the world's great powers and realigned the geopolitical triangle with the Soviet Union. It was a savvy political move, too, clinching Nixon's image as a foreign policy virtuoso and helping ensure his re-election later that year despite his inability to solve the quagmire in Vietnam. Nixon's China trip was one of those rare political coups that seemed utterly impossible beforehand and unavoidably logical afterward.

Yet more than anything, it was terrific theater. To see Nixon, that beady-eyed Communist-hater, toasting the Mao suits in the Great Hall of the People, climbing the Great Wall and meeting Mao Tse-tung himself in the Communist Party's inner sanctum - it was mesmerizing. No one cared that the visit was largely symbolic and light on content. It was great symbolism at play.

In "Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World," accomplished historian Margaret MacMillan draws together the colorful strands of the drama, with all its inherent chanciness and tension. MacMillan is strong on diplomacy but weak on Chinese politics; yet she's a fine writer whose illuminating account shows why it's no wonder that the trip inspired an entire Western opera and a permanent place in our lexicon, as in "It was a Nixon-goes-to-China moment."

The scene was unforgettable: China, though still embroiled in a violent paroxysm called the Cultural Revolution, appeared serene and enchanting to American viewers. A gaggle of U.S. reporters followed Nixon to scenic spots and his meetings with China's happy workers and smiling schoolchildren. The cast of characters was top-notch: Nixon, Mao, Henry Kissinger and Premier Chou En-lai, each with his own individual brand of psychosis, paranoia and dastardly political skill. The intermingling of these four, in a complex diplomatic mating dance that could easily have gone wrong, is a historian's dream.

MacMillan opens with the flight to Beijing. Nixon was anxious; he knew he was taking a big risk. If the trip failed, he could be blamed for making a colossal blunder. The draft diplomatic agreement between the two countries was still far from complete, and there was no guarantee it would be signed by the end of the trip. There was no commitment by the Chinese that Nixon would even meet Mao, who was said to be having difficulty getting out of bed.

Nixon had studied hard, as he always did, knowing that true diplomatic success would require a subtle understanding of the politics of the leaders he was meeting. He practiced using chopsticks so he wouldn't look silly at banquets. His advance team worked hard as well, to get the best camera angles for the U.S. media. MacMillan also shows us how Nixon was concerned with petty problems, like keeping his secretary of state, William Rogers, out of major meetings. Nixon worked better with Kissinger, his national security adviser, who shared his love of stealth.

In fact, MacMillan shows us that Nixon and Kissinger insisted on secrecy at every step. On Kissinger's previous trip to Beijing to lay the groundwork for the rapprochement, Mao and Chou - no slouches in clandestine matters - were baffled by American demands to keep all quiet. Nixon and Kissinger claimed that the right wing in Washington would sabotage their plans. Relying on interviews, research and newly available documents, MacMillan persuasively challenges this view: Nixon and Kissinger, she suggests, were just addicted to secrecy.

Mao was much like Nixon in his paranoia, his inability to make friends and his brilliant interpretation of history and politics. For Mao, deciding to open relations with the United States marked a sharp turn from his ultra-isolationist foreign policy. MacMillan stumbles here. She sees Mao as a patriot, concerned with the good of his nation, when what he really cared about was the good of Mao. For decades, historians have said he missed few opportunities to destroy his country.

Mao drove foreign policy to meet the imperatives of his own domestic politics. As chairman of the Communist Party, he was like a mob boss, appearing to be totally in charge but perpetually at work to keep his captains off-balance, lest one challenge him. It was precisely that fear that generated Mao's feud with his No. 2, Lin Biao, whose mysterious death in a plane crash offers a haunting backdrop to the time period when Nixon's trip was being planned.

Vietnam became a fascinating sideshow to the trip; leaders in Hanoi turned apoplectic at the sight of their main enemy shaking hands with their supposed patron in the north. In the months afterward, Mao was impatient with Hanoi and tossed its leaders a simple suggestion: Sign a peace treaty, regroup until after most Americans have left and then roll in. "That is, in effect, what happened," MacMillan observes.

It was Taiwan that presented the toughest impediment to a joint agreement on Nixon's visit. Kissinger labored to come up with language that would satisfy China's insistence that America support eventual reunification and still allow for a U.S. demand for peaceful change. It was treacherous diplomatic territory, and only on the final day of the visit did both sides agree to what became known as the Shanghai Communiqué.

In 1972, few could imagine that Taiwan would today be a thriving democracy, that China would enjoy one of the biggest economic expansions in world history, that the Soviet threat would be a distant memory, that Vietnam would be welcoming American investors. Yet MacMillan's book shows how those dynamics, in varying ways and degrees, all grew from seeds planted the day Nixon's foot landed on Chinese soil.

"The Tet Offensive: A Concise History. "BY JAMES H. WILLBANKS. Columbia University Press, 2006, 272 pp. $29.50.

"Powerful and Brutal Weapons: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Easter Offensive. "BY STEPHEN P. RANDOLPH. Harvard University Press, 2007, 416 pp. $29.95.

These two books on Vietnam reflect a shift in scholarly focus from the Johnson administration to the Nixon administration. The Tet offensive of 1968 is generally accepted to have been a turning point in the war, not because of what happened on the battlefield -- where the Communists were, if anything, defeated -- but because of the shocked reaction in the United States and the consequent hemorrhaging of credibility from the U.S. military and political leadership. Willbanks offers a careful and judicious evaluation of the extensive literature already generated on Tet. He considers the controversies surrounding such issues as what the North Vietnamese thought they were going to achieve, why the Americans were caught by surprise, the key battles of Khe Sanh and Hue, and the role of the media. Useful maps and documents and a good bibliography are provided. Students especially will find this invaluable.

Tet may have encouraged the Americans to look for a way out of Vietnam through negotiations with the North, but it took another full presidential term, and considerable death and destruction, before this could be achieved. The literature on Nixon's war remains smaller than that on Johnson's, but it is growing, and Randolph's book on the 1972 Easter Offensive is a notable addition. The offensive is interesting at the operational level, for it was the point at which the U.S. military began to appreciate the potential of "smart weapons." At the political level, the book provides a compelling portrayal of Richard Nixon as a strategist at the height of the imperial presidency, using tough and apparently reckless tactics to shore up his bargaining position. In this case, his gamble paid off, as Moscow kept its focus on the prospect of a wider détente with the United States and so muted its response to the North's pain. Still, the ferocious U.S. campaign was not enough to stabilize the situation in South Vietnam's favor.

DRAGON SEA - A True Tale of Treasure, Archeology, and Greed Off the Coast of Vietnam by Frank Pope. Illustrated. 341 pp. Harcourt. $25.

Review by Holly Morris (NYT Jan 28, 2007)

Somewhere off the coast of Vietnam in the mid-15th century, in a stretch of cantankerous ocean where typhoons raged and pirates plied their trade, the Dragon Sea claimed a kitchen girl who cowered in the galley of a junk. The ship groaned and buckled, and as it sank the icy seawater thundered through the galley. Eventually “the girl’s struggles stopped. ... Life faded from her eyes as around her the water grew dark with depth.”

Surely this girl, probably a domestic or a slave, had no claim to the porcelain that plummeted along with her to the floor of the sea. But she was the lost cargo’s lone sentry until, nearly 500 years later, the treasure was salvaged by a marine archaeologist, Mensun Bound; a Malaysian businessman, Ong Soo Hin; and a multinational crew of 160 seamen, archaeological draftsmen, cooks and saturation divers.

Frank Pope, a protégé of Bound’s and the expedition’s archaeological manager, has written an engaging account that delves into the ethical conundrums of marine salvage, the deadly physics of the deep ocean and the roiling waters of professional subterfuge.

“Dragon Sea” is laced with drama largely because of the conflicting motives of the expedition’s leading figures. Bound, the headstrong, sometimes prickly director of Oxford University’s Maritime Archaeological Research and Excavation unit, advocates the purest methodology in the recovery and insists on adding to the historical record. Ong, whom Pope describes as a corner-cutting financier with a smash-and-grab track record in marine salvage, wants pay dirt. As Pope tells the story, Ong needed Bound’s credibility to cut international red tape. Bound needed the funding Ong could bring and got in bed with market forces (a racy move for an academic). After all, Pope writes, “wrecks were fast disappearing at the hands of dredgers and cable-layers as well as treasure-hunters, while archaeologists stood by helplessly, lacking the funds to work.”

The idea was to bring up the booty, conserve and analyze it properly, then auction off a part of it to pay for the excavation (and make a tidy profit). The rest would be preserved for museums and history.

They made their pact. And then lived to regret it.

Ho hum, you might think, as I initially did, at the thought of old, wet porcelain. But Pope’s impassioned, detailed reporting draws us into the story of ceramics and Vietnam, a country that has spent much of its past in the shadow of China, but enjoyed a brief self-ruled “golden age” during which artistic and political independence flourished. A central question of the book becomes: Are these relics from that short renaissance in the mid-15th century? If so, they’d hold clues that could rewrite a part of history.

But the archaeological and historical mysteries are eclipsed by the physiological ones because saturation diving to retrieve ceramics entombed 230 feet underwater is a complex, expensive — and somewhat wacko — endeavor.

This high-stakes, high-risk job requires a breed that makes North Sea fishermen look like wussies. Talk about pressure. They work on the seabed in wet suits, tethered to the ship above by a life-sustaining umbilical cord. At the end of an exhausting 12-hour shift of moving debris through giant vacuums, and digging out and packing porcelain, as well as negotiating dark waters, site grates and instructions from above by those who are video-monitoring, they enter a cramped pressurized bell and are hauled shipboard. That bell is affixed to another small bell, where they stay until going underwater again 12 hours later. They never leave the bells, and thus never depressurize. For two months.

The hazards are many. An infinitesimal leak caused by a faulty seal or loose screw in a pressurized bell and they’re instantly, and dramatically, dead. Gas “explodes from the chest, rupturing the lungs if it is unable to escape the throat. Gas bursts from the sinuses, ripping open the eardrums. Vapors trapped inside the bowels expand. ... Explosive decompression is not a pleasant way to die.”

Toward the end, the book begins to fizzle. Pope’s crack job of blending storms and tension, regional history, the gruff cast of characters — and even the occasional cliffhanger and red herring — creates expectations. We’re half-waiting for M.C.D., Massive Catastrophic Decompression, either literally or metaphorically. So when the climax is merely ill will, a dashed romance of treasure hunting and trust — not, thankfully, “Perfect Storm”-like tragedy — we’re both relieved, and slightly guilty for wanting more.

More than 250,000 intact pots were successfully excavated from the seabed before an encroaching typhoon season brought the expedition to an undramatic close.

The book’s final message is an elegiac plea that the estimated three million wrecks still lying untouched in the world’s oceans be addressed with integrity. But we’re not left with any real hope that that will be the case.

The Internet frenzy of 2000 figures into the porcelain’s final chapter. Brushing aside traditional auctioneers like Sotheby’s and Christie’s, Ong tries to cash out via the sexy new player: eBay. A saturated market and botched auction saddled with fuzzy historical information (which enrages Bound) all contribute to a huge financial loss. Ong spent $14 million to recover the cargo and bring it to auction, and in the end the porcelain cleared just under $3 million.

Five years later, to complete the circle, and see the final act of consumerism colliding with historical significance, I logged on. Now it’s a fire sale. For $55, plus $9 shipping and handling, I purchased a blue-and-white round ceramic box. It’s gorgeous, but I only want to slide it back into the ocean, and return it to the kitchen girl.

Holly Morris’s “Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for Women Who Are Changing the World” has recently been published in paperback.

China and Vietnam: The Politics of Asymmetry by Brantly Womack. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006. 294 pp. $27.99.

Brantly Womack offers a thematic history of China-Vietnam relations from the earliest times to the 21st century. The countries moved from being unequal empires to allies to enemies to the current relationship of normalcy. But certain things never changed – the cultural ties and tensions between the two, the geographic proximity with its attendant border problems, and rivalry over influence in the rest of Indochina. The most important continuity has been that Vietnam is at once a fairly large and powerful country (currently with a population of about 80 million), and the neighbor of a country that is much larger and more powerful. Womack synthesizes the secondary literature in Chinese and European languages, and has learned much from interviews in China and Vietnam. He insightfully characterizes the relationship as one in which the larger partner is never threatened but cannot dominate, while the smaller partner is permanently vulnerable but can never be subdued. For China, Vietnam is one of the most challenging of its many neighbors; for Vietnam, China is the gravitational core that Vietnam has defined its identity by resisting.

The three chapters that will be most useful to political scientists analyze shifts in the relationship from 1950 to the present, tracing China’s aid to North Vietnam, the souring of the relationship in the context of the Sino-Soviet dispute, mutual hostility in the 1970s and 1980s, and normalized relations in the 1990s. Three preceding historical chapters help us see how the events of the last fifty years grew out of deeply established patterns rooted in the geopolitics of the relationship.

Less persuasive is the attempt to frame this history as a case study for a new, “general theory of asymmetry” (p. xii) in international relations This theory as Womack develops does not come across as an alternative to realism, as he claims, but an application of realism to this particular dyad and, presumably, to others that resemble it. (Some potential comparative case studies are alluded to but not developed.) Although neo-realism focuses attention on the relations among great powers and thus has relatively little to say about a regional power like Vietnam, classical realism argues more generally -- just as Womack does -- that any country’s distinctive circumstances of geography and relative power shape its search for security. It is not a new discovery that most power relations in the internatonal system are asymmetric. What Womack has to say about the generic nature of such relationships is often useful, sometimes obscure, but at no point a challenge to realism.