In a recent interview the immensely talented Denis Johnson remarked, “Details magazine called me up a while ago and said, ‘Did you know it’s the tenth anniversary of the publication of Jesus’ Son?’ I told them, ‘I’ve written about ten books since then. Why don’t you write about one of them?’�

Indeed.

The fixation of a men’s magazine on a slim and gritty and totally engrossing collection like 1992’s Jesus’ Son is understandable. Via its eleven brief stories the reader enters the hallucinatory, vivid world of vagrancy, violence and drug abuse (The title Jesus’ Son is pulled, importantly, from Lou Reed’s “Heroine�). In Johnson’s deft hands, the seedy American underbelly becomes not only accessible but powerfully illustrative of how each and every one of us attempts to make sense of the world and our place in it. It’s that kind of book. It’s writing that makes you want to grab a pencil and underline passages or read choice sentences aloud to whomever’s within earshot.

Johnson’s lyrical prose together with his astonishing insight may well be the qualities that make a work like Jesus’ Son appeal to more than just hip male readers of a magazine such as Details. Though most of his characters are drunk or high, though many are perpetrators or victims of some unsavory crime or another, Jesus’ Son had the force to make me (suburban mother of three) put off my kids’ increasingly insistent requests because I was so utterly hooked by the very first story. In this case, as in most of Johnson’s oeuvre, the narrative voice is what makes the tale’s foreboding reality so compelling. “Car Crash� is told in the clear, caring voice of the hopped-up, downtrodden Fuckhead, the hitchhiking passenger in the innocent family’s station wagon that hurtles into a horrific nighttime crash. Johnson allows his narrator, unharmed and wandering about the wreckage, this poignant observation of another victim:

He was snoring loudly and rudely. His blood bubbled out of his mouth with every breath. He wouldn’t be taking many more. I knew that, but he didn’t, and therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.

Which is tragic and poignant, yes, but actually fine for the reader. Because Johnson’s perceptive and kind-hearted and ultimately very likeable narrator is implicitly promising to tell us, privileged readers, what is real.

Although Jesus’ Son rightly earned Johnson literary renown, there is such depth to his oeuvre that any of his fans can understand the author’s frustration with the disproportionate attention paid the slim volume (he has famously said, “Even now people mention Jesus’ Son as if it were the only book I’ve ever written.�). Poet, novelist and playwright born in 1949 and now living in Northern Idaho, Johnson has won myriad awards and earned an exceptionally devoted following for far more than just one collection.

What’s remarkable is that the force inherent in each of Johnson’s varied works is present in his first novel, 1983’s Angels. Here Johnson brings to life the Houston brothers: Bill, James and Burris. Angels’ exceptional climax and denouement derive from these young men’s unrelenting need for mind-altering substances (they drink, pop pills and shoot heroine), for money (they rob a bank), and for women (they each have one and they each treat her abominably). Vivid characters and excellent structure are supported by other skills: here is the evocation of an Arizona that functions almost as a protagonist, the sere backdrop mimicking the paucity of the brothers’ prospects. Here are multi-faceted and distinct women with whom Johnson’s characters have such complicated, fascinating relationships: the brothers’ fanatical mother, their enabling, lost and abused girlfriends and wives. Here is the incessant reliance upon substances that is a staple in much of Johnson’s work (of the rumor that he wrote Jesus’ Son while using Johnson has said, “I was straight when I wrote that; I didn’t write it under the influence. I don’t know how you can. I mean, your hands get real big. How could you type? I think it’s silly for anyone to think you could write under the influence.�). Angels evinces the poet’s care for language and cadence, the novelist’s startling selection of detail, the honest man’s ability to share one very compelling version of what is—for him but also for the rest of us—so unerringly and problematically real.

But if Angels and Jesus’ Son are the most well-known and lauded of Johnson’s fiction, if these are the only two works a reader has read, that reader is doing him or herself the kind of disservice that Details magazine did in overlooking the rest of Johnson’s wide-ranging and consistently outstanding fiction. Fiskadoro (1985) posits a bleak post-apocalyptic world, The Stars at Noon (1986) is narrated by a savvy and well-drawn female journalist searching for truth and self-definition in Nicaragua, Already Dead: a California Gothic (1998) paints a gorgeous and involved tableau of contemporary Northern California’s marijuana-growing locals.

I suspect that the interviewer calling from Details might have missed my favorite of Johnson’s novels. As willing as I am to acknowledge the power and originality of the better-known works, the Johnson I love best happens to be a non-gritty, nonviolent, deeply moving story of a failing pseudo-academic in Iowa who suffers the loss of his wife and child then a quiet but heartrending infatuation with a young artist. It may well be that The Name of the World (2000) resonates with me because its characters’ academic/suburban lives feel more familiar than those of the bank-robbers, daredevil journalists and pot growers that populate Johnson’s other books. I want, though, to reject this theory in favor of the suggestion that it is the clarity of the prose, the rendering of detail and the subtle but powerful characterization that made The Name of the World stay with me so long after the volume was shelved. There are select images, of course, from the more extra-ordinary Johnson works that linger in my subconscious—an amenable peeping tom hoisting himself up to a woman’s shower window each evening in Jesus’ Son, the graphic and indelible and seriously affecting rape scene in Angels, the artful description of redwoods in Already Dead—yet it is the hushed and ordinary The Name of the World that made the most lasting impression on me.

Because Johnson’s oeuvre has such depth, readers both familiar and unfamiliar with the author should rejoice as his latest novel, Tree of Smoke, hits bookstores. The promise is palpable. As opposed to the recent novella-length The Name of the World (129 pages) that I devoured in a too-quick morning, this new volume numbers 600+ pages. This means the kind of sustainable, engaging Johnson narrative that readers haven’t had the privilege of sinking into for almost a decade, not since the 431-page Already Dead in 1998. Further promise lies in the excerpt from Tree of Smoke in this summer’s New Yorker’s fiction issue, Johnson piquing fans’ interest with the promise that this new novel will return to the intriguing Houston brothers who so engrossed us more than twenty years ago in Angels.

Indeed, the real strength of Tree of Smoke lies in its further depiction of the Houstons. Johnson’s new novel is sprawling and compelling, ambitious in scope and offering up some very fine writing. Previously Johnson has led us through novelistic territories from Central America to Northern California, from the Midwest to the Southwest. He has brought to life academics and corporate types who differ markedly from Jesus’ Son’s Fuckhead and the motley dysfunction of the Houston clan. All of this has allowed Johnson an even more evolved and insightful vantage as he follows the Houston brothers back in time from their harrowing and wasted adulthoods in Angels to their adolescence in this latest novel.

As if miraculously resurrected from his execution at the close of Angels, Bill Houston is the character upon whom Tree of Smoke opens. In a divinely unsettling scene, Houston engages in nonsensical violence when he shoots a small monkey in the Vietnamese jungle:

Seaman Houston walked over to the monkey and laid the rifle down beside it and lifted the animal up in his two hands, holding the buttocks in one and cradling its head with the other. With fascination, then with revulsion, he realized that the monkey was crying. Its breath came out in sobs, and tears welled out of its eyes when it blinked. It looked here and there, appearing no more interested in him than in anything else it might be seeing. “Hey,� Houston said, but the monkey didn’t seem to hear.

This powerful opening, rife with emotion, violence and impotence will resonate with Johnson’s readers. The similarities between Houston’s reaction and that of the narrator of the car crash victim in Jesus’ Son demonstrate Johnson’s skill in tackling large issues such as death (or deceit or hopelessness or mental instability) with candor and aplomb. At the very opening of Tree of Smoke Johnson’s devotees are immediately engaged because of how young Bill Houston’s minor jungle calamity inflects the image of the more tragic, older Houston that the reader has harbored since Angels. Johnson wisely underscores the compelling viewpoint of a younger Bill Houston, ending the first scene with emphasis on the impressionable youth the author promises to explore: “As he held the animal in his hands, its heart stopped beating. He gave it a shake, but he knew it was useless. He felt as if everything was all his fault, and with no one around to know about it, he let himself cry like a child. He was eighteen years old.�

Tree of Smoke, however, does not linger long enough for this reader’s liking with the young Bill Houston. The novel cuts a much wider swath than Johnson readers would expect even after having followed the talented author’s variety of characters through their variety of locales. Contextualized by chapter headings that enumerate consecutive years: 1963, 1964, 1965 etc. (then a jump from 1970 to 1983, the year in which Angels was published), Tree of Smoke is predicated on the assassination of President Kennedy, the tragedy informing much of the work. The years, thus, lend important organization, given that Johnson’s ambition makes the novel feel, at times, fragmented. Amid a multiplicity of characters, the novel’s center comprises not the Houston boys, but an uncle-nephew pair, Colonel Francis Sands and William “Skip� Sands, both of whom engage in the Sisyphean task of collecting and organizing information for the United States military during the Vietnam War.

As Johnson continues to introduce involved plot lines and new sets of characters, the reader awaits the kind of careful crafting that gave the brief but complex The Stars at Noon or the far longer Already Dead such narrative clarity. Clarity remains wanting, however, as the Sands men attempt to arrange unwieldy masses of information on ineffectual 3x5 cards, as the Houston brothers slog through unnerving basic training and terrifying jungle warfare, as Vietnamese families are divided by politics and poverty and senseless violence. Clearly an effort to portray the horror and perplexity of war, the chaos and confusion in the novel does succeed in its aim, but not without the chaos and confusion seeming simply…chaotic and confused.

Johnson attempts clarification with one of the novel’s central images, that of the Tree of Smoke, a biblical phrase that questions the possibility of arriving at truth through communication. Corruption, bureaucracy, the problems faced by one country’s involvement in another country’s war…all of these issues are explored by renegade alcoholic Colonel Sands who reminds the reader at turns of Conrad’s Kurtz, Robert Duvall’s Lt. Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now and even “Hogan’s Heroes� Colonel Klink. When Colonel Sands loses his position in the military, he urges his nephew to unravel the convoluted information he has amassed. Buried in the colonel’s cryptic 3x5 cards is the novel’s clearest definition of the Tree of Smoke reference:

Tree of Smoke—(pillar of smoke, pillar of fire) the “guiding light� of a sincere goal for the function of intelligence—restoring intelligence-gathering as the main function of intelligence operations, rather than to provide rationalizations for policy. Because if we don’t, the next step is for career-minded power-mad cynical jaded bureaucrats to use intelligence to influence policy. The final step is to create fictions and serve them to our policy-makers in order to control the direction of government.

While Skip Sands fails to fully comprehend this and other of his legendary uncle’s imperatives, the reader is offered other story lines that both diverge into new Johnson territory and delve deeper into vintage Johnson terrain. Skip engages in a curious pseudo-sexual epistolary relationship with an evangelical Calvinist missionary woman, Kathy Jones, who comes to play a principal role at the novel’s close. Although the relationship is vaguely reminiscent of the amorous couple in The Stars at Noon, Kathy Jones mostly reminds the reader of the Houstons’ mother, Jones’ religion serving as a vehicle for the spiritual questioning that Johnson’s work undertakes. Just as the academic protagonist of The Name of the World finds himself mostly outside the university life he manages only to half-inhabit, Skip Sands fails to secure the placement he seeks in the military, organizing his discharged uncle’s notes first from an outpost in Manila then deep in the Vietnamese jungle but never in his desired Saigon, Skip always on the periphery of the military establishment.

The notion of military estrangement and conspiracy becomes increasingly prominent as the idea of espionage and double agents emerge, the importance of truth versus deceit becoming critical in Tree of Smoke. As if to point up the parallels between military deceit and a lack of personal integrity, Tree of Smoke abounds in doubles of all stripes. The novel opens with William Houston only to cede the stage to William (“Skip�) Sands (who then doubles again when he gains the alias William Benét). In another doubling, this younger Sands occupies the novel’s center with an older Sands male. In addition to shifting from William Houston to William Sands, the shift away from Bill Houston brings us to a second Houston, James, the younger brother whose horrifying trajectory comes well to the fore in the novel’s most powerful scenes. Such redoubling is not limited to Americans: Vietnamese Nguyen Minh shares his name with Nguyen Hao while conspicuously named British spy Anders Pitchfork finds his double in nastily named German assassin Dietrich Fest. This proliferation of characters ushers in the plots and subplots through which Johnson depicts the disillusion and doubt, the confusion and complexity of the war he has chosen to depict.

While so many characters with so many attendant plots can feel unwieldy, Tree of Smoke does deliver on the level of the scene, the paragraph, the sentence.

The passages that feel most finely wrought are actually those in Arizona—as though clarity is impossible in the obfuscation of the jungle—where the Houston brothers’ backstory is writ large. In the empty expanse of the American Southwest, seventeen-year-old James’ harrowing arc begins with mundane drives through the desert with Stevie, the fourteen-year-old girlfriend readers will recognize as his one-day wife in Angels:

He kissed her and very gently touched her arms, her cheeks, her neck. He knew better than to put his hands where he wanted to. “I’ve got one warm beer left,� he said.
“Go ahead. I’m not thirsty.�
He sat against the driver’s door, and she against hers. He was glad the sun was setting so he didn’t have to worry what he looked like. Sometimes he wasn’t sure the expression on his face made any sense.

This spare depiction of adolescence is vintage Johnson. Here, in limpid prose, are planted the seeds of substance abuse, of sexual aggression, of inalienable distance between men and women, of self-misunderstanding and self-absorption. Readers sympathize with James’ nihilistic confusion, his deep but paralyzing concern for his unbalanced mother, his lack of a father and his despair.
Given this adroit development of James Houston, it follows that the jungle scenes in which young James experiences the brutality of warfare prove more memorable than depiction of governmental confusion and corruption. In one such outstanding scene Johnson endows one of James’ cohorts with the unique voice that speaks for the group of ambushed soldiers:

In the silence between air strikes below on the mountain [Hanson] spoke quietly, like a golf-game announcer during a tense moment on the putting green: “Hanson keeps low. Hanson feels the sweat running down his backbone. Hanson’s thumb is on the trigger. If it comes, the enemy will feel sincerely fucked with. Hanson will explode their faces. Hanson’s finger licks the trigger like a clit. Hanson loves his weapon like a pussy. Hanson wants to go home. Hanson wants to smell clean sheets. Clean sheets in Alabama. Not them stinky sour ones in Vietnam.�

Whereas proliferation of characters threatens to confuse the narrative in other instances, here the sudden emergence of Hanson feels ingenious. Hanson serves as a double for Houston, a second young soldier with an unmistakably similar name. This doubling is positive—as opposed to digressive or gratuitous or confusing—because of the depth with which the reader understands James and the way in which Hanson increases that understanding. Johnson’s earlier depiction of the bleak but empowering sexual experiences that shape James’ bitterness and dissatisfaction add gravity and texture to Hanson’s feminizing of his weapon. When James later commits further violence against men and women both, the reader has a better sense of his desperation in part because of this brief passage.

James’ trajectory is so well honed, in fact, that the novel can sometimes feel imbalanced. During long stretches without the Houstons we want more of Bill and James. When James returns from Vietnam to Arizona, then forward in time to 1983 (only a handful of years before his fated unraveling in Angels) we savor the dark and gritty, astoundingly insightful passages. James’ vivid portrayal means that other characters—especially the many minor characters—feel less tangible, less engaging than the Houston brothers.

Not to say that there isn’t plenty of Skip Sands to plumb, plenty of interesting ruminations on the possibility of true communication in the mouth of Colonel Sands to consider. Kathy Jones’ evolution is compelling and the converse devolutions of other prominent characters are equally engaging. The bulk of Tree of Smoke indeed feels as well-described and well-executed as a reader expects from this author.

But then the long-time Johnson fan reaches the passage in which Bill Houston witnesses a drunken Honolulu shore-leave shooting, or the scenes in which an unstable Mrs. Houston fails to communicate anything in wrenching telephone conversations with her sons. We are then reading a literary master truly at the height of his game. Each Houston scene comes to its close and we are a little disappointed, perhaps, to descend again into the steamy convolutions of the war-torn jungle.

Still, readers should follow Johnson into Saigon and San Marcos, to Manila and Kuala Lumpur. Johnson devotees may feel nostalgia for Arizona, for Bill and James. But those who follow Johnson into the depths of Tree of Smoke, those readers will be rewarded.