Sentences like this start flashing past: “She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her.” What a thing to say, but the book is moving on. Two drunken soldiers, one of them an amputee, have a long, inane conversation, during which the disabled one announces, “My invisible foot hurts.” Later, the other soldier weeps “like a barking dog.” The lines roll like billiard balls with weird English on them, they spin and skid, often just after their last comma, and then they plunge into their pockets with a crack.  But I haven’t told you what the thing is about yet. It’s mostly about a man named Skip Sands, a novice in the C.I.A, who begins the book as a young man in 1965, and makes it almost to the end, though by then it’s 1983 and he’s ancient; and his uncle, a Kurtz-like character who starts a little operation of his own, and then dies so ridiculously that no one can believe he’s actually dead; and the Houston brothers, Bill and James, who serve their country and then wander, angry and free, back to Nothing-to-Do, Arizona; and two Vietnamese military men, one from the South and one from the North, who flip this way and that; and another intelligence officer named Storm, who carries the book like the last man in a relay race, delivering it at the finish to a Canadian woman named Kathy, a Seventh-Day Adventist and aid worker, who has encompassed the whole story, who winds up bearing much of the book’s considerable grief, and who gets, as she deserves, its final pages to mourn.  Many of the themes from Johnson’s earlier books are recapitulated here, large and small: the American unleashed on the world and the world rendered opaque to Americans; tenderness as unexpected swerve and thuggishness as uninflected animus; death as the palm at the end of the mind. He has odd stylistic quirks — a superstition, for example, about proper names. (Bill Houston, in “Angels,” is rarely called anything but Bill Houston, though here he occasionally goes by just plain Bill; the narrator of “Jesus’ Son” is anonymous but for a raunchy nickname; a figure in his novel “Fiskadoro” is named “________”; and “Tree of Smoke” includes a minor character who refuses to be called anything but Black Man.)  Yes, there are a few things I wish Johnson had done differently. He puts more hardware on display here (guns, airplanes, intelligence equipage) than I needed to see, and more rock ’n’ roll military dialogue than I needed to hear. And he can occasionally overindulge in significance: a longish journey, at the end of “Tree of Smoke,” left me with the uneasy sense that he can’t tell the difference between Joseph Conrad, who was a genius, and Joseph Campbell, who was not. So it’s not a perfect book; but then, a perfect book would be perfectly safe, and I don’t have time for that.  I spent a long time reading “Tree of Smoke,” and as I neared the end I found myself wishing it were longer. The grief I mentioned above: there are very few writers today who can get that on the page, and our literature is tepid without it. Epiphanies occur in almost every book, but a credible apocalypse is much harder to find. And a little redemption in the last chapter is so common that it’s barely noticeable; but how many books can really convey what it means to be lost, let alone, as this one does, what it might mean to be found?  614 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.  Jim Lewis’s most recent novel is “The King Is Dead.” He lives in Austin, Tex.  A version of this review appears in print on , on Page 71 of the New York edition with the headline: The Revelator. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Denis Johnson’s new novel is a massive thing and something like a masterpiece; it’s the product of an extraordinary writer in full stride.