Tree of Smoke

From Barnes & Noble

Denis Johnson parses the tragedy of Vietnam in a magnum opus (his first full-length novel in nine years) inscribed with all the pain and sadness, loneliness and futility surrounding that misbegotten war. At the center of a Dickensian cast of characters stand a CIA recruit working under deepest cover, his famous uncle (a legend in intelligence circles), a widowed Canadian nurse, and a pair of G.I. brothers who have traded in the desolation of their dead-end lives for the nightmare of war. Unfolding like a fever dream, Tree of Smoke captures a uniquely turbulent time in powerful images that linger long after the story ends. As he has done so many times before, Johnson shines a light into the darkest corners of the human soul and shows us, finally, where redemption truly lies.

David Ignatius

To write a fat novel about the Vietnam War nearly 35 years after it ended is an act of literary bravado. To do so as brilliantly as Denis Johnson has in Tree of Smoke is positively a miracle. This novel makes large demands on the reader: to submit to its length, to its disorienting language and structure, to the elusive and shattering experience of its characters, and finally to its sheer ambition to be definitive an encompassing novel for the Vietnam generation. It is a presumptuous book, in other words, and you may resist for the first several hundred pages. But it will grab you eventually, and gets inside your head like the war it is describing—mystifying, horrifying, mesmerizing. Johnson, a poet, ex-junkie and adventure journalist, has written a book that by the end wraps around you as tightly as a jungle snake.
—The Washington Post

Alan Cheuse

For a reader with stamina, the rewards come steadily. Johnson is a fine stylist of the world of soulful disaster. The phrase "tree of smoke," as he presents it, is the literal translation from the Hebrew of the pillar in Exodus. This time -- in these pages -- that pillar of smoke leaves us to a dark, dark vision of a promised land.
—All Things Considered

Michiko Kakutani

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…Bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war.
—The New York Times Book Review

David Ulin

It's beautiful writing: with Johnson, the writing is always beautiful.
—Los Angeles Times

David Hellman

There is so much going on in Tree of Smoke, and so many levels of symbolism, that it is hard to do the story justice here…. Johnson brings his talents as a poet to bear, especially when describing the jungles and cities of Asia.
—San Francisco Chronicle

Andrew Hubner

Johnson is an author who has captured the zeitgeist of American experience as surely as Twain, Hemingway or Ellison.
—The New York Post

Gail Caldwall

Denis Johnson’s apocalyptic, doom-and-grace ridden Vietnam novel has a lot of fire in its belly…if Johnson has a signature theme throughout his work, it's a kind of quasi-mystical redemption on the other side of the abyss; his gorgeous prose and willingness to go deep have led the way through the scarily lightless corridors of his fiction.
—The Boston Globe

Evan Hughes

With its humane depiction of the most private battles within battles, Tree of Smoke ought to take its place among the great American novels of any war.
—The New York Sun

Jim Lewis

Good morning and please listen to me: Denis Johnson is a true American artist, and Tree of Smoke is a tremendous book, a strange entertainment, very long but very fast, a great whirly ride that starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder, loops unpredictably out and around, and then lurches down so suddenly at the very end that it will make your stomach flop. It comes with the armor and accoutrements of a Major Novel: big historical theme (Vietnam), semi-mythical cultural institution (military intelligence), long time span (1963-70, with a coda set in 1983) and unreasonable length (614 pages), all of which would be off-putting if this were not, in fact, a major novel, and if Johnson's last big book hadn't been the small collection of eccentric and addictive short stories called Jesus’ Son (1992). Tree of Smoke is a soulful book, even a numinous one…and it ought to secure Johnson's status as a revelator for this still new century…
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

If this novel, Johnson's first in nearly a decade, is-as the promo copy says-about Skip Sands, it's also about his uncle, a legendary CIA operative; Kathy Jones, a widowed, saintly Canadian nurse; Trung, a North Vietnamese spy; and the Houston brothers, Bill and James, misguided GIs who haunt the story's periphery. And it's also about Sgt. Jimmy Storm, whose existence seems to be one long vision quest. As with all of Johnson's work-the stories in Jesus' Son, novels like Resuscitation of a Dead Manand Fiskadoro-the real point is the possibility of grace in a world of total mystery and inexplicable suffering. In Johnson's honest world, no one story dominates.

For all the story lines, the structure couldn't be simpler: each year, from 1963 (the book opens in the Philippines: "Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed") to 1970, gets its own part, followed by a coda set in 1983. Readers familiar with the Vietnam War will recognize its arc-the Tet offensive (65 harrowing pages here); the deaths of Martin Luther King and RFK; the fall of Saigon, swift and seemingly foreordained.

Skip is a CIA recruit working under his uncle, Francis X. Sands, known as the Colonel. Skip is mostly in the dark, awaiting direction, living under an alias and falling in love with Kathy while the Colonel deals in double agents, Bushmills whiskey and folk history. He's a soldier-scholar pursuing theories of how to purify an information stream; he bloviates in gusts of sincerity and blasphemy, all of it charming. A large cast of characters, some colorful, some vaguely chalked, surround this triad, and if Tree of Smokehas a flaw, it is that some characters arevirtually indistinguishable. Given the covert nature of much of the goings-on, perhaps it is necessary that characters become blurred. "We're on the cutting edge of reality itself," says Storm. "Right where it turns into a dream."

Is this our last Vietnam novel? One has to wonder. What serious writer, after tuning in to Johnson's terrifying, dissonant opera, can return with a fresh ear? The work of many past chroniclers- Graham Greene, Tim O'Brien, the filmmakers Coppola,Cimino and Kubrick, all of whom have contributed to our cultural "understanding" of the war-is both evoked and consumed in the fiery heat of Johnson's story. In the novel's coda, Storm, a war cliché now way gone and deep in the Malaysian jungle near Thailand, attends preparations for a village's sacrificial bonfire (consisting of personal items smashed and axed by their owners) and offers himself as "compensation, baby." When the book ends, in a heartbreaking soliloquy from Kathy (fittingly, a Canadian) on the occasion of a war orphan benefit in a Minneapolis Radisson, you feel that America's Vietnam experience has been brought to a closure that's as good as we'll ever get.

Michael Coffey isPW's executive managing editor.

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Library Journal

This major Vietnam novel depicts the era's distinctive psychedelic brutality, the ineptitude of the U.S. military effort, and the otherworldly theater of the "intelligence" operations surrounding the politics of the war. Skip Sands is starting out in the hazy world of the CIA under the tutelage of his uncle, Col. F.X. Sands, a veteran of World War II and many years of mercenary covert actions. They are involved in an assassination in the Philippines, where the novel begins in November 1963, and then move on to Vietnam. There, the Colonel sets up an undercover situation for Skip. Whether the Colonel is a rogue agent gone over the edge is open to question. Down at the bottom of the command chain are the brothers Houston, Bill Jr. and James, members of the alcoholic, sociopathic underclass of rural and Bible Belt America last seen in Johnson's Angels. It is these characters with whom the author seems truly in touch. Moving chronologically, the novel proceeds into the late Sixties, when the war seems not so much lost as running down on the political, military, and cultural energy powering it earlier. Ugly and fascinating, with many shattering scenes, this long work may seem familiar to fans of Apocalypse Nowbut is nevertheless gripping. Recommended for all fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ5/15/07.]
—Jim Coan

From the Publisher

"This is the very talented Will Paton’s greatest performance as a reader so far. His range of voices and evocation of character—the hopeful, the innocent, the cynical, the despairing and the mad—bring the tale to even more terrible and blistered life than the book itself, making it a 23-hour excursion into mesmerizing darkness.”--The Washington Post

“Patton is outstanding...[his] performance is quiet, powerful, and gut-wrenching....This is MUST listening."--AudioFile Magazine

“Denis Johnson’s novel, Tree of Smoke, is masterful and irredeemably dark…Will Patton’s seamless narration transforms this novel into a superb audio.”--BookPage

“Will Patton’s reading of “Tree of Smoke” is superb...The experience overall is one of hallucinatory horror, laugh-out-loud outrage, of sadness at the tremendous waste of lives, money and the national pride that went into Vietnam and did not return.”--Sarasota Herald-Tribune

"Easily the best audiobook I listened to in 2007, "Tree of Smoke" has been called a Vietnam War book, but its reach is much deeper...Johnson has written a powerful document, and Patton matches the depth and breadth of the novel with a performance that captures the nuance of the language..."--Times Union

“American actor Will Patton provides an excellent fully-voiced reading…it fits the story like a glove. He will keep listeners involved.” – SoundLibrary.com

Praise for Denis Johnson:
“Once Johnson gets his hooks into you—it takes about two sentences—it’s...pretty much impossible to stop reading.” —The New York Times Book Review