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Tree of Smoke, the new novel by Denis Johnson, opens in the Philippines on the day John F. Kennedy was shot.

“Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed. Seaman Houston and the other two recruits slept while the first reports traveled around the world. There was one small nightspot on the island, a dilapidated club with big revolving fans in the ceiling and one bar and one pinball game; the two marines who ran the club had come by to wake them up and tell them what had happened to the President. The two marines sat with the three sailors on the bunks in the Quonset hut for transient enlisted men, watching the air conditioner drip water into a coffee can and drinking beer. The Armed Forces Network from Subic Bay stayed on through the night, broadcasting bulletins about the unfathomable murder. . .”

According to Butch, Johnson was in the think tank brought in to advise Francis Ford Coppola on the Apocalypse Now script when the shoot was in trouble. Another adviser was Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard’s collaborator in his Maoist period.

A description of the Philippines: “The setting sun lowered from the clouds and struck up at them in such a way that suddenly the entire town throbbed with a scarlet light.” The central metaphor of the tree of smoke: “”And I will give portents in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and palm trees of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon come to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.” (from the Book of Joel)