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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