School’s back in session and so is my weekly missive. And there is no better way to start up again for the fall then to write about a book that arrived in stores this week. Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke is a sprawling, intimidating, and thrilling novel that tackles the long and complicated Vietnam War.

I was eager to get the book this summer and when read the first 3 pages just for a taste I found it so utterly sad and affecting that I couldn’t put it down. All other books I was reading were immediately demoted and I was locked into reading all 600 plus pages. These pages tell parallel stories of entanglement and confusion.

Mostly it is the story of a young CIA man Skip Sands who is under the wing of his Kurtz-like uncle who goes by the name The Colonel. Skip is training to be Psy Ops and spends his days locked in an effort to make sense of information that seems to have no provenance while his own person gets merged with the jungle and his alias and the force of nature that is his uncle. His story is flanked by that of two restless, dangerous brothers Bill and James Houston who are slowly alienated from humanity and then spit back out into their desert hometown on Arizona.

Johnson captures gentle and funny moments as his characters hurtle or plod through their fortunes and reveals brutal and ugly details with the same off-handed gravity, which is of course unsettling, but edifying. Tree of Smoke is an undertaking, long and daunting, but deeply rewarding.