✍ Scribed by Johnson, Denis
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
EDITORIAL REVIEW:
***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.
**Denis Johnson **is the author of five novels, a collection of poetry and one book of reportage. He is the recipient of a Lannan Fellowship and a Whiting Writer�s Award, among many other honors for his work. He lives in northern Idaho.
**A Pulitzer Prize Finalist**
**A *New York Times* Notable Book of the Year**
**A *Time Magazine* Top 10 of the Year**
**A* Boston Globe* Best Book of the Year**
**A *Washington Post* Top 10 Book of the Year**
**A *San Francisco Chronicle* Best Book of the Year**
**A *Chicago Tribune* Favorite Book of the Year**
**A *Seattle Times* Favorite Book of the Year**
**A *Library Journal* Best Book of the Year**
****
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.
Also available on CD as an unabridged audiobook. Please email [email protected] for more information.
"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 . . . *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."�**Jim Lewis, *New York Times***
"Denis Johnson's wildly ambitious new novel, *Tree of Smoke*, reads like a whacked-out, hallucinogenic variation on such whacked-out, hallucinogenic Vietnam classics as Francis Ford Coppola's *Apocalypse Now*, Michael Herr's *Dispatches*, Robert Stone's *Dog Soldiers* and Stephen Wright's *Meditations in Green*. It features a central character who comes to see himself as a combination of the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and another who comes across as a latter-day version of Kurtz in Conrad's *Heart of Darkness*. What's amazing is that Mr. Johnson somehow manages to take these derivative elements and turn them into something highly original�and potent . . . it's a powerful story about the American experience in Vietnam, with unsettling echoes of the current American experience in Iraq. It is a story about bad intelligence and military screw-ups and people who have lost their way, a story like so many of Mr. Johnson's earlier novels, about Americans in purgatory, waiting impatiently, even expectantly, for the coming apocalypse . . . 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 . . . [A] deeply resonant novel that is bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war.��**Michiko Kakutani, *The New York Times***
"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 . . . *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 . . . I spent a long time reading *Tree of Smoke*, and as I neared the end I found myself wishing it were longer."�**Jim Lewis, *The New York Times
***�*Tree of Smoke* is an ambitious, long, dense, daunting novel sited at the heart of a great American evil, the Vietnam War . . . Like the war itself, *Tree of Smoke* delivers an intense experience of loss, shame, futility, confusion . . . Denis Johnson is a formidable prose writer, and his book is composed in a plain, straightforward, efficient style. Understatement rules The physical experiences of daily life in tropical Asia is kept fresh, page to page. The dialogue is convincing, neatly adapted to the particularities of the widely different characters. The moments of black comedy that can emerge even amid the worst miseries of war are deftly captured . . . *Tree of Smoke* joins the corporal�s guard of truly significant novels about the Vietnam War�works such as *The Quiet American*, *Going After Cacciato*, *Dog Soldiers*, *The Things They Carried*, *Meditations in Green* . . . Denis Johnson has created an absorbing, provocative work of art.��**Norman Rush, *The New York Review of Books
***"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."�**Alan Cheuse, *All Things Considered***
�To write a fat novel about Vietnam 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 for the Vietnam generation. It is a presumptuous book, in other words, a
📜 SIMILAR VOLUMES
### Amazon.com Review _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 Johnso
Denis Johnson's long-awaited Vietnam novel is as labyrinthine and mysterious as the tunnels of Cu Chi. Johnson follows dozens of characters, including the wayward Houston brothers (who appeared as would-be bank robbers in Johnson's nearly perfect first novel, ANGELS), a cadre of PsyOp (Psychological
EDITORIAL REVIEW: \*\*\*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 R
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