Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

How hard is Tree of Smoke to read?

Tree of Smoke scores 78 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 70 out of 100

Johnson draws on military and intelligence jargon ('Psy Ops,' 'MACV,' 'double agent'), Vietnamese and Filipino cultural terms, and a range of registers — from the colloquial speech of American GIs to the formal cadences of intelligence cables. The lexical demand is real but contextually supported; readers unfamiliar with the Vietnam-era operational apparatus will work harder. This places Tree of Smoke above Gravity's Rainbow (80) is too generous — it sits closer to Blood Meridian's zone (72 baseline), with fewer invented coinages and more conventional narrative vocabulary. The 70 positions it above accessible literary fiction but well below Ulysses (95) or The Sound and the Fury.

Sentence structure: 72 out of 100

Johnson varies sentence length dramatically — short declarative bursts alternate with longer, subordinated passages that pile sensory detail and qualify their assertions mid-clause. His most demanding prose appears in interior monologue and the Colonel's oracular speeches, where syntax strains toward Biblical cadence. This is more demanding than standard contemporary literary fiction but falls well short of Absalom, Absalom! (85) or Ulysses (98). The comparison with Pynchon (78) is instructive: Johnson's syntax is less systematically recursive, more reliant on parataxis and sudden register shifts than hypotactic elaboration.

Abstraction: 75 out of 100

Tree of Smoke is grounded in concrete war narrative — bodies, terrain, operations — but its characters frequently ascend into metaphysical territory: the Colonel's lectures on power and history, Skip's crisis of American faith, Kathy's Calvinist wrestling with predestination and suffering. Johnson holds abstraction and scene in productive tension; the philosophical freight is carried by dialogue and interiority rather than essayistic digression. This exceeds Blood Meridian (75) slightly in the consistency of its metaphysical ambition, but sits below Waiting for Godot (85) in the proportion of text that operates at purely abstract register.

Information density: 76 out of 100

The novel covers 1963 to 1983 across the Philippines, Vietnam, and the United States, tracking five major narrative threads: Skip Sands's intelligence career, the Houston brothers' military and post-military lives, Kathy Jones's missionary work, Nguyen Hao's double-agent existence, and Colonel Francis Sands's psy-ops project. Each section requires the reader to re-orient — to different geography, chronology, and psychic register. Johnson does not summarize; he drops readers into mid-thought and trusts them to reconstruct context. The density is high but distributed across 700 pages rather than compressed into short chapters, placing it above War and Peace (80) in complexity per unit but below Ulysses (90).

Narrative indirection: 80 out of 100

The central intelligence plot — Colonel Sands's plan to use a double agent to penetrate Viet Cong intelligence networks — is never fully explained to the reader, mirroring its opacity to Skip himself. Motivations are implied through action and omission rather than stated. The Colonel's purposes remain genuinely ambiguous: messianism, manipulation, and idealism are held in suspension throughout, and the reader must construct plausible interpretations from evidence that never fully settles. This is above Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (78) in sustained opacity and closer to the mode of Faulkner, where the truth of events is a cumulative inference from partial perspectives rather than something the narrative discloses.

Symbolic density: 82 out of 100

The title comes from a biblical pillar — Exodus 13:21, the cloud of smoke by day that guided Israel — signaling that the novel's Vietnam is overlaid with prophetic and typological meaning from the outset. The aswang — a shape-shifting Filipino demon — functions as the novel's organizing metaphor for psy-ops and for America's self-delusion in Southeast Asia. The grenade thrown into the well appears as an image of buried, deferred destruction. Kathy's Calvinist theology runs as a structural counterpoint to the Colonel's secular messianism. These symbols accumulate and interact rather than resolving, placing the novel above To the Lighthouse (82) and in the range of Blood Meridian — though without Blood Meridian's mythological saturation.

Ironic distance: 74 out of 100

The gap between American rhetoric and American conduct in Vietnam is the novel's persistent ironic engine — characters who believe they are making history discover they are making rubble. The Colonel's mission — to fight psychological warfare by becoming the very manipulation he deploys — collapses into self-parody without the novel announcing it. Skip's arc from idealistic CIA officer to disillusioned AWOL wanderer is structured as ironic reduction. Johnson does not editorialize; the irony is structural, arising from the distance between characters' self-understanding and the reader's view of their situation. This places the novel above Lolita (75) in the extent to which irony organizes the whole, while remaining below Pale Fire (78) or The Tin Drum in formal sophistication of the ironic apparatus.

Resolution withholding: 85 out of 100

Tree of Smoke withholds resolution at every narrative level. Skip's fate after going AWOL is rendered in a brief, late section that answers location but not meaning. The double-agent project's ultimate effect on the war is left unassessed. The Houston brothers — James and Bill — reach no redemption or reckoning, only continuation. Kathy's spiritual crisis is suspended rather than resolved. The novel's 1983 epilogue offers a provisional glimpse of surviving characters in circumstances that clarify little. This is programmatic rather than accidental — the novel's structure performs the thesis that the Vietnam War left nothing resolved, only altered. It approaches the sustained withholding of Gaddis (92) without that novel's formal severity.

Structural complexity: 82 out of 100

The novel spans 1963 to 1983 in dated sections, but its chronology is non-linear within that frame and its POV shifts without consistent signaling between Skip Sands, the Houston brothers, Kathy Jones, and Nguyen Hao. Intercalated documents — intelligence cables, mission reports, fragments of testimony — appear without framing. The effect is archival: the reader assembles the novel from competing partial records rather than following a single narratorial perspective. This is comparable to Infinite Jest (85) in its multiplicity of perspectives and temporal complexity, though less radically experimental in its formal apparatus than Pale Fire (88).

How Tree of Smoke is regarded

Tree of Smoke holds a literary regard score of 80 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

About the author

Denis Johnson