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Tree of Smoke

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Publisher
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Date
Award Winners
Fiction
Historical
Literary
National Book Award Winners
Winner of the 2007 National Book Award for Fiction

Tree of Smoke is the story of William "Skip" Sands, CIA – engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong – and the disasters that befall him. It is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert and into a war where the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away.

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What The Reviewers Say
Positive
The New York Times Sunday Book Review
Denis Johnson is a true American artist, and Tree of Smoke is a tremendous book, a strange entertainment … Tree of Smoke is a massive thing and something like a masterpiece; it’s the product of an extraordinary writer in full stride … 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 … 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.
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Positive
The New York Times
It’s a powerful story about the American experience in Vietnam, with unsettling echoes of the current American experience in Iraq … Skip believes in the goodness and promise of America with boyish innocence and ardor...Skip’s innocence, however, is tarnished when he witnesses the agency’s brutal assassination of a priest (falsely suspected of running guns) in the Philippines, and in Vietnam he quickly becomes lost in the wilderness of mirrors created by his fellow intelligence officers … Mr. Johnson intercuts the stories of Skip and the colonel with those of half a dozen other people caught up in the war … Mr. Johnson not only succeeds in conjuring the anomalous, hallucinatory aura of the Vietnam War as authoritatively as Stephen Wright or Francis Ford Coppola, but he also shows its fallout on his characters with harrowing emotional precision.
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Mixed
Bookforum
Tree of Smoke, a tortuous epic of American counterinsurgency in Asia, presents an array of characters bearing familiar Johnsonian auras of desperation, threat, and abjection … Not all of Johnson’s characters find themselves so tormented, and some enjoy blessedly uncomplicated states of narcissism or depravity or mere unscrupulousness. But the people whom Johnson asks his readers to care about tend to be those who suffer queasy bouts of inner terror … Tree of Smoke carries with it a self-conscious air, as if Johnson has sought to create the definitive novel of the war, one that recapitulates the tropes that have evolved out of nearly half a century of writing and films about the conflict. But the book’s depictions, particularly the bleak tale of four-tour veteran James Houston and the soldiers with whom he serves, come perilously close to cliché.
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