In “Tree of Smoke,” Skip Sands initially seems like a very different sort of Johnsonian hero. 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. 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. Johnson’s earlier novels, about Americans in purgatory, waiting impatiently, even expectantly, for the coming apocalypse. 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. 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. Johnson somehow manages to take these derivative elements and turn them into something highly original - and potent. 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.”
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