An amputee with a phantom limb, fancy that. Lewis’s aside that Tree of Smoke “doesn’t feel like a Denis Johnson novel” lends weight to the assumption that a writer cannot become famous by writing like this, at least not yet. But with no way to prove insincerity on the reviewers’ part, I have to pretend to believe that they really do consider Tree of Smoke to be “something like a masterpiece” (Lewis) and “bound to become one of the classic works of literature” (Kakutani) about the Vietnam War. (The novel, a New York Times best seller, has been nominated for a National Book Award.)

Underlying the hype is the silly notion that if a work introduces plenty of characters and traipses after them for enough years and pages, it is ipso facto ambitious. The true mark of an ambitious work is its style and depth. We would recognize Anna Karenina as such a novel even if only its first few pages had survived, because they depict characters with extraordinarily rich and complex inner lives. In contrast, Tree of Smoke starts off with one Seaman Bill Houston shooting a tiny monkey he sees in the jungle. (The symbolism of this happening hours after JFK’s assassination is crude in more ways than one.) The animal, evidently a gun buff, spreads its arms “enthusiastically” before dropping to the ground, where its mood changes. “With fascination, then with revulsion, [Bill] realized that the monkey was crying.” Such a realization would take far too short a time for anyone to become fascinated, let alone for fascination to yield to revulsion—and why revulsion anyway? Later, Bill meets up with his younger brother James, a soldier. For some reason, Bill does not know James’s age, and appears surprised to learn that he is not yet 18. James “done lied” to the recruiter. The level of their conversation can be imagined.

We are then introduced to another central character, Skip, with the news that

having been raised in the American heartland he was dedicated to steering clear of personal controversy, to ignoring scowls, honoring evasiveness, fending off voices raised in other rooms.

Ignoring scowls is no way to steer clear of controversy, but never mind that. The derivation of a man’s personality from his place of origin is the stuff of second-rate thrillers. After two months in the Philippines, Skip

liked the people, he hated the climate. It was the start of his fifth year serving the United States as a member of its Central Intelligence Agency. He considered both the Agency and his country to be glorious.

Anyone expecting a psychological novel from characters so lacking in complexity deserves to be disappointed.

There is no point in dwelling on the story line, because even some of the book’s admirers have conceded its sluggishness and overlength—albeit with some humbug about how flaws make a good novel more likable, perfection being such a turnoff, etc. As for the action, it never feels authentic. Soldiers do not laugh in unison or call out frantically for M&Ms during a sudden and intense firefight, nor would a soldier crawling through bush find the attendant lacerations “exhilarating.” Not once does the reader feel fear or tension. Whether it’s because of the compulsive references to the Kennedys or the constant emphasis on the soldier as rock-and-roll hipster, one thinks only of the silver-screen ’Nam and of Life, not life, feeble substitutes for the riches to be had from Michael Herr’s Dispatches and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.