Winner of the National Book Award One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon.com, Salon, Slate, The National Book Critics Circle, The Christian Science Monitor. . . .
Tree of Smoke is the story of William "Skip" Sands, CIA--engaged in Pschological 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. In the words of Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, Tree of Smoke is "bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war."
Amazon Significant Seven, September 2007: Denis Johnson is one of those few great hopes of American writing, fully capable of pulling out a ground-changing masterpiece, as he did in 1992 with the now-legendary collection, Jesus' Son. Tree of Smoke showed every sign of being his "big book": 600+ pages, years in the making, with a grand subject (the Vietnam War). And in the reading it lives up to every promise. It's crowded with the desperate people, always short of salvation, who are Johnson's specialty, but despite every temptation of the Vietnam dreamscape it is relentlessly sober in its attention to on-the-ground details and the gradations of psychology. Not one of its 614 pages lacks a sentence or an observation that could set you back on your heels. This is the book Johnson fans have been waiting for--along with everybody else, whether they knew it or not. --Tom Nissley
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 3.0 / 5.0
Long, tedious, sad, angry and confusing. It was awful!:
I can't resist novels about Vietnam. And this 1997 book had absolutely rave reviews. It even won the National Book Award. Reviewers called it a masterpiece. I just HAD to read it. Now, 702 pages later, I'm sorry I did. This book was just plain awful. And the only satisfaction I got out of slogging through this long and tedious read is to be able to review it and say, "well - I tried". The book starts in 1963 and spans about 20 years. During this time we see various characters go through their sad... more info
Bloated:
What a long-winded novel that has been falsely praised. These character are flat, poorly written, and offer no degree of complexity. I would hope this is not America's finest writer for we are in big trouble if it is. If you want a novel that reveals the complicated world of Vietnam, read The Things They Carried.
"War and Peace" for the United States:
Judging from the distribution of reviews, most people either love "Tree of Smoke" or hate it. I loved it. In fact, it's the best contemporary novel I've read in years. Like "War and Peace," "Tree of Smoke" examines both the universals of human life and a war that transformed the nations involved. TOS sweeps over 20 years -- covering the war from 1963 to '70, with a denouement in 1983 -- and shows us the experience through the lives of CIA agents, enlisted men, Western humanitarians, and South... more info
Not A Vietnam Novel:
I picked up this novel because I thought it was about Vietnam. As it turns out, it was this author's fantasy of his presumption of Vietnam. I also thought he had been to Vietnam, and it turns out that he was not. Aside from some obvious errors (he names F-16 aircraft which did not exist), this is a pretentious acid trip novel. To be sure, there are moments of odd, almost mystical writing, but they are well buried in page after page of the dense quagmire of this author's mind. As a bit of fantasy... more info
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