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| Tree of Smoke: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Denis Johnson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $27.00
Buy Used: $4.35
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Avg. Customer Rating:  84 reviews
Sales Rank: 14121
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 624
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.9
ISBN: 0374279128
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780374279127
ASIN: 0374279128
Publication Date: September 4, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
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
Product Description
Once upon a time there was a war . . . and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That’s me. This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God, this is a story like nothing in our literature. Tree of Smoke is Denis Johnson’s first full-length novel in nine years, and his most gripping, beautiful, and powerful work to date.
Book Description
"Once upon a time there was a war ... and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking America. That's me." This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Viet Cong—and the disasters that befall him on account of his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This 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 its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God, this is a story like nothing in our literature.
Tree of Smoke is Denis Johnson’s first full-length novel in nine years, and his most gripping, beautiful, and powerful work to date.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 79 more reviews...
 Perhaps I'm just a philistine November 4, 2007
89 out of 121 found this review helpful
I just couldn't get into this book; I was real patient, trudging through more than 300 pages before I abandoned it. I felt characters were two dimensional; I felt no connection to them. Was there a plot in there? This is only about the 3rd book I've given up on in my life (I can be pretty obsessive!). I acknowledge that this was a literary work reviewed very favorably. Perhaps it was well crafted, it just was not for me. I'm glad others experienced great pleasure from reading it.
 An exquisitely written, long, ponderous, heart-rending and at times frightful novel September 4, 2007
84 out of 110 found this review helpful
The novel begins with the senseless, needless and heartless shooting of a tiny, wild monkey, "not much bigger than a Chihuahua dog", by eighteen years old Seaman Apprentice William Houston. He was walking in the Grande Island of the Philippines, looking for a wild boar to hunt. He doesn't find a wild boar. He sees a harmless and helpless monkey in a tree, instead, and shoots it with a .22-caliber rifle. When the fatally wounded monkey falls to the ground, he picks it up. Johnson writes, "With fascination, then with revulsion, he realized that the monkey was crying. Its breath came out in sobs, and tears welled out of its eyes when it blinked. It looked here and there, appearing no more interested in him than in anything else it might be seeing." When I read the brief episode, the brutal and senseless killing of a harmless wild animal which was foraging for food and minding its own business - five paragraphs in all - I was quite outraged, at first. But soon it dawned upon me that, after all, this novel was about the Vietnam War; and wasn't the Vietnam War needless, senseless, brutal and outrageous also? I calmed down and continued to read.
The novel is about two brothers named William Houston, a Seaman Apprentice, and James Houston who serve in the military in the Vietnam War, and a CIA agent named Skip Sands, and his uncle Colonel Francis Sands, and another intelligence officer named Storm, a military man from South Vietnam named Hao and a spy from North Vietnam named Trung, and a Canadian aid worker named Kathy Jones, a nurse who goes to Vietnam after her husband, a priest, is killed. Because of the author's digressive, ruminating and reflective style, the story at times is difficult to follow. The length of the novel (614 pages) is a hindrance also. The beauty of the novel lies mainly in Johnson's prose. Gripping, descriptive passages, vigorous and fascinating dialogues, and biting commentaries flow off the pages. His prose is lucid and smooth-flowing and almost poetic; many of the sentences are as bewitching and elegant as these: "From all around came the ten thousand sounds of the jungle, as well as the cries of gulls and the far-off surf, and if he stopped dead and listened a minute, he could hear also the pulse snickering in the heat of his flesh, and the creak of sweat in his ears. If he stayed motionless only another couple of seconds, the bugs found him and whined around his head."
The book reads like a collage of a series of episodes put together. The characters ponder over a bewildering array of philosophical, spiritual, metaphysical and religious questions. Even the title of the novel itself- Tree of Smoke- can be traced to the Bible. But Johnson's keen observations of nature, and his ability to describe the wonders of nature with the magic of his pen, cast a spell on the reader and hold the reader's attention. At the end of the novel I felt as if I had been standing by the Niagara Falls at night, listening to the ear-splitting wails of its dark, swirling, foamy water rushing towards its inevitable doom. And when I shut the book an extraordinary thing happened: I felt as if I was seeing a sliver of the moon emerging from dense, gray clouds in a dark, starless sky, its silvery light beginning to light up the gloomy sky. Denis Johnson is a masterful writer. Reading this book was an awe-inspiring, dizzying, bewildering and at times frightful experience.
 A very good Veitnam war era read. September 4, 2007
57 out of 70 found this review helpful
The tree of smoke is a crazy drug addled ride through the Vietnam war. It easily could have become a derivative of such Vietnam classics as Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" or Robert Stone's "Dog Soldiers." But the author is able to take similar elements from these and other books about this subject and turn out something different. The plot roams and rampages about, which will probably be disconcerting to some, but it is really just a metaphor for the craziness of war, and this war in particular. It's the story of the American experience in Vietnam and is particularly timely given the current situation in Iraq. The story follows Skip, a CIA operative, Young and eager to prove himself and defeat communism. Skip believes in the American dream of democracy for everyone and the essential goodness of America and America's interest in Vietnam. I do not like to give too much away in my reviews but suffice to say Skip Witnesses the brutalities of war and sees things that question is allegiances. He learns that not all is black and white.
This is not the first book on the follies of war and surly will not be the last. Overall it deserves five stars even though the plot is unwieldily at times. The greatness of this book is how the author was able to bring the reader back to the hallucinogenic era of that bloody little war and display the fallout on his characters psyche. This is a must read! this was my favorite read of the summer! This was my first Denis Johnson novel, now I am going to order Jesus' Son: Stories by and Fiskadoro.
Deserves the National Book Award October 27, 2007
48 out of 67 found this review helpful
TREE OF SMOKE is yet another terrific Viet Nam novel, an anti-war novel, but it is more than that on its deepest level. It is written with great compassion about the condition of humanity.
The opening paragraph, noting the senseless death of one man (who happens to be President Kennedy), is beautifully juxtaposed with the sniping death of the monkey, and the mutual anguish of it. For senseless killing kills and kills the killer too. It is a karma entrenched in human history, a cycle that we cannot shake.
Not only are monkeys used literally and symbolically throughout the novel but the young American's Vietnamese counterpart, Trund, is nicknamed Monk, and double-meanings and allusions to Buddhism and Judeo-Christianity envelope the better angels of the novel's worldview.
Just as Joseph Heller's CATCH-22 was about World War II but read as an anti-Viet Nam War novel, this is a Viet Nam novel that can be read as an anti-Iraq War novel. The 'tree of smoke' in the title represents many things, among them the mushroom cloud of weapons of mass destruction and the fear of them used as both an excuse and a weapon.
Some critics have said that the 'tree of smoke' was imaginary, and I won't argue that (although President Nixon's secret plan to win the war was based upon this threat), but this is a novel, and its deeper meanings will resonate with readers in different ways.
TREE OF SMOKE's size might intimidate some, and it is over 600 pages, but it is big and fast, easy to read, a comfortable book to open and hold. The story keeps moving, and the pages fly by deceptively fast. There is a strong field of nominees for this year's National Book Award, but this one has to be my pick for its beautiful writing and its sense of compassion. An unforgettable novel.
Cartoony and Cliche October 2, 2007
35 out of 51 found this review helpful
'Tree of Smoke' is a terrible disappointment--tired, cliched, and wince-inducing throughout--packed full of ridiculous characters with cartoon names (Jimmy Storm, the Colonel, and Skip, to name a few of the major ones).
The writing is trash with little evidence of a putative stylist at work. Since when did the sentence fragment become ascendant in American letters anyway? The dialogue is spectacularly bad: how many pages of dialogue between idiot, drunken soldiers can one be expected to endure? What's the point?
Don't get me wrong, I love long books, and consider Wallace's 'Infinite Jest' and Gaddis's 'The Recognitions' to be the best two books since 1950, but 'Tree of Smoke' could have used a ruthless editor's attention.
I had high hopes for this book. You should steer clear. Read 'Jesus' Son' or 'Angels' instead. Those are DJ at his best.
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