Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

Published 2007 · 649 pages · 207,731 words · about 28 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

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 79 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.

Prizes

Where Tree of Smoke sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (391 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Tree of Smoke scores 86 out of 100. A second mythos, tragedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
“It ain’t never tomorrow, not in this fucking movie. Never ain’t nothing but today.”
Symbol: Mythical (archetypal)
Uncle F.X., pillar of fire, tree of smoke, wanted to raise a great tree in his own image, a mushroom cloud
Mythos: Irony vi (visio malefica) (irony vi)
The sacrifice of the soul of the stranger may prevent the world’s end.
Genre: Novel + Anatomy
They are good verbalizers—sometimes in two or more languages.

Where the story of Tree of Smoke takes place

  • Vietnam and Southeast Asia, 1963-1983 (1963 to 1983), the main setting
  • Grande Island, Luzon and Mindanao, Philippines, 1963-1965 (1963 to 1965)
  • Saigon, Cu Chi and Cao Quyen, South Vietnam, 1966-1970 (1966 to 1970)
  • Phoenix, Arizona, and Florence prison, 1967-1970 (1967 to 1970)
  • Kuala Lumpur and the Belum Valley, Malaysia, 1982-1983 (1982 to 1983)
  • Minneapolis, April 1983

4 things that are true of Tree of Smoke, with the passage for each

  1. The novel opens on the morning after President Kennedy's assassination.

    Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed.

  2. The Colonel's card-catalogue file holds more than nineteen thousand entries.

    The colonel’s entire card catalog system, over nineteen thousand entries ordered from the oldest to the latest, rested on four collapsible tables

  3. Skip Sands learns of his mother's death through a cable that is three days old.

    “Now. Skip. Your mother has died. Beatrice. Bea.”

  4. Skip, as 'Benét', is sentenced to hang by a Malaysian judge.

    He ordered the prisoner to rise and sentenced him to be bound with rope, flayed with a cane, and hanged by the neck until he was dead.

Scenes in Tree of Smoke that Frye would name

53 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Sparagmos, untitled
grabbed the man’s eyeballs hanging by their purple optic nerves and turned the red veiny side so that the pupils looked back at the empty sockets The tortured prisoner's body is torn apart before the platoon.
Displacement, untitled
Strangled them, strung them up by the legs, drained the blood out of each one The aswang vampire myth is displaced into a realistic counterinsurgency tactic.
Pathos, untitled
He did not feel himself collapsing toward the water, and by the time he landed in it he was dead. Carignan, the Judas-confessing priest, is killed by a poison dart while bathing.
Anagnorisis, untitled
Who’s the person in the Bible most like me—who am I most like? Judas. Carignan names himself in his homily.
Katabasis, untitled
Cowboy turned on the light and went down headfirst, the way some of them had seen the Kootchie Kooties do it. James enters the tunnel.
Sparagmos, untitled
She sent the family out and dismembered the stillbirth and delivered it in bloody pieces Kathy dismembers a deformed stillbirth in a scene of war's monstrous births.

Books that share these scenes with Tree of Smoke

About the author

Denis Johnson