Tree of Smoke: A Novel

Tree of Smoke: A Novel
by Denis Johnson

Tree of Smoke: A Novel
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Book Summary Information

Author: Denis Johnson
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-09-02
ISBN: 0312427743
Number of pages: 720
Publisher: Picador

Book Reviews of Tree of Smoke: A Novel

Book Review: Very, very dull
Summary: 1 Stars

When the most helpful positive review for a novel includes the word "ponderous" in its title, it should give you pause. Ponderous is a good word for this novel. Dull is another. It's not that nothing happens. It's that people stand around thinking disjointed existential thoughts for 30 pages, then something happens in a single paragraph (say, someone gets killed),and then we get another 30 pages of disjointed existential thoughts about the one paragraph worth of action.

I didn't particularly care for the author's style, which is sort of dispassionate and deceptively lean. I say "deceptively," not because the writing actually contains deep reserves of hidden meaning, but because the book is over 600 pages long, which definitely does not qualify as "lean" to my way of thinking. It is over 250 pages before much of anything seems to happen, and the book has a rather lengthy epilogue (over 70 pages), where again not much of anything happens, so that' really over half the book if you think about it. Even if Denis Johnson's prose were the greatest joy this side of Heaven, that's a lot of joyous prose to slog through.

Summary of Tree of Smoke: A Novel

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

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