Tree of Smoke Pdf Summary
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.
Tree of Smoke was the 2007 National Book Award Winner for Fiction.
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Tree of Smoke Review
4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, Frustrating, Brilliant
Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2010
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The skinny: I loved Tree of Smoke, but I’m going to take some time this weekend to figure out more precisely why – this book fascinated and frustrated me. It’s a very different type of Vietnam novel, focusing on the “secret war” instead of on the clash of arms, although there’s that as well. But it’s not verismo along the lines of The Things They Carried or psychedelic verismo a la Going After Cacciato – two great novels of Vietnam. Like ambitious Vietnam books, it speaks to broad topics on which it’s hard to have an original thought. Yet Johnson succeeds and seems a wholly credible witness to the times and places he writes about so stylishly. For me, as good as his eye is and as intriguing as the Byzantine machinations of his characters, Johnson’s brilliant dialogue carries the story – at at once tough, believable, and literary, and integral to the layering of Johnson’s deep, organically wrought cast of Americans, Vietnamese, Brits, Germans, and others. (I frankly don’t understand the fusillades he’s drawn on both his dialogue and his characters.)
Tree of Smoke struck me more than a few times as an odd Asian doppleganger-counterpart to Roth’s American Pastoral – depicting “the War that Deranged the Americans,” individually and in their clusters of society, both home and abroad, exposing all their tender nerves and mythologized beliefs. Johnson gives us more than a few Kurtz-like figures, and Conrad resonates throughout the descent of Skip Sands, “Johnny Storm,” and others into various forms of call-it-what-you-will. Johnson’s Houston brothers vault from SE Asia to invade/descend into Roth’s American scene, although two-thirds a continent away from suburban New Jersey. I suppose this kind of thing – call it “madness as a metaphor” for short, but the book is so much more than that – are about as hackneyed in a Vietnam novel as anything else; after all, for many writers, soldiers, and civilians, Vietnam was the psychedelic war, and the psychotic war, and many other related things to many people. But in my reading, Johnson gives this new and plausible depth and dimensions. And he does so, I should add, with a ferocious sense of humor and with descriptive powers that are flat-out supernatural. On page 4, in which he spins out the fate of an unlucky higher jungle primate, we get an early display of Johnson’s powers, a hint of his sensibility, and a sense of how this may all play out.
I’ve docked the book a star for its threadbare “Ah….the nefarious CIA devours its own” theme that so many writers are drawn to. Democracies have a hard time with secret organizations, and democratic peoples spin yarns – delirious imaginings, conspiracies, short stories, novels, editorials, and such – about anything they can’t peer into as deeply as they wish; I’m more than a little tired of this, and I apologize for a pet peeve. (If having said as much seems a spoiler, it will be one for only the most obtuse of readers, to include anyone who takes on the book without first having read the dust jacket or the cover of the paperback.)
But in the end, a lot of readers – as we can see from the reviews of those who were less impressed with the book than I was – will wonder about what Johnson has left us with. For so protean a novel, each of us will decide for ourselves. I’d like to ponder it a bit more. It’s (obviously) not a book for everyone. It’s talky. It takes its own sweet time. It’s extremely calculated in its ambiguities. Readers who are not of Johnson’s generation, who weren’t devouring newspapers in the 1960s and 1970s, or who were never in uniform, may view much of this novel as obscure or pedantic. But Johnson ties things up pretty well by page 614, and Tree of Smoke gripped me, hard. To me, it created a literary world well worth inhabiting, and it made me want to read a great deal more Denis Johnson.
About Denis Johnson Author Of Tree of Smoke pdf Book
Poet, playwright and author Denis Johnson Author Of Tree of Smoke pdf Book was born in Munich, West Germany, in 1949 and was raised in Tokyo, Manila and Washington. He earned a masters’ degree from the University of Iowa and received many awards for his work, including a Lannan Fellowship in Fiction (1993), a Whiting Writer’s Award (1986), the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from the Paris Review for Train Dreams, and most recently, the National Book Award for Fiction (2007).
Tree of Smoke pdf, Paperback, Hardcover Book Information
- Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition (September 4, 2007)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 624 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0374279128
- ISBN-13 : 978-0374279127
- Item Weight : 2 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.79 x 1.87 x 9.91 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #87,940 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #212 in Military Historical Fiction
- #674 in War Fiction (Books)
- #4,583 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews: 4.0 out of 5 stars 405 ratings
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