Tree of Smoke: A Novel (edit title)

• Rated 2 stars

“I don't know. Maybe it's just taken me too long to read this book-- I'm on page 500 or so now. It has taken a long time for the many plot threads of the book to come together, in my opinion. Skip Sands hasn't proven to be the really dynamic character I needed to make the border-line espionage/military plot in Vietnam come to life. The book hasn't made me feel my time has been well spent-- and at around 600 pages it is a commitment.”

• Rated 1 stars

“I gave up on this book in less than 100 pages. I guess I'm a little lost, here. Starting out, I wanted to give such a prestigious award winner a chance, but the timeline of events and vague characters had me so turned around that I just couldn't enjoy anything about it. The references to the CIA, the "covert" operations, and the geographical references were not in my realm of understanding and the whole think was Greek to me. I'll put this one aside and mail it to someone else because I'm baffled everytime it crosses my mind. Someone please explain this book to me....”

• Rated 2 stars

“My review: http://blog.yourpointismoot.com/2008/09/tree-of-smoke-by-denis-johnson.html”

• Rated 3 stars

“This is a novel set during the Vietnam War and focuses on the operations of the CIA in that theater. Main characters are Colonel Francis Sands and his nephew Skip and the Houston brothers, Bill Jr. and James. The Sands work for the CIA and are attempting to find a Viet Cong double agent. The Houston brothers join up with the military because there aren't any better options for them and both are profoundly affected by their military service. I would have to preferred to hear more about the Houstons and less about the Sands. This book would have been 20 pages shorter if the "f" word was omitted. Another in a long string of books that I didn't love. It was well outside my usual taste.”

• Rated 4 stars

“This isn't the best novel about the Vietnam war-- that still may be Stephen Wright's MEDITATIONS IN GREEN, just as Michael Herr's DISPATCHES is still the best (creative) nonfiction account of what the war FELT like (or, must have felt like). But Johnson's prose manages to be laconic, colloquial, rhapsodic, and repulsive, sometimes in alternating sentences. And the book captures the cracked idealism of some of the war's early combatants, as well as the hopelessness of some of the later ones. Sure, it meanders, and Johnson has a cavalier attitude toward plot, but I think that in the case of Vietnam all plots eventually foundered. Nothing turned out the way it was supposed to, not even for the winners.”

• Rated 4 stars

“Johnson has been skirting around writing a "Vietnam" novel for years. This attempt is successful on multiple levels in that it's long, disjointed, often sloppy and startlingly violent--just like the war. The book itself is a physical representation of the war. The language can be lush and beautiful as well as stark and brutal. It's a difficult journey that has the reader constantly questioning when and where these threads are going to tie together--they often don't. Johnson however offers points of view that have not been articulated so clearly before, that of the nurse/missionary, German assassin and further on down the line. Johnson tries to show the endless permutations of suffering. In the end, it's a broken book containing large plot holes, dangling loose ends and a narrative thread that's harder to follow than the tunnels he writes about. However, it's a massive, important work that makes a statement on intelligence, confusion and the binding nature of human suffering.”

• Rated 5 stars

“As the book opens, it is 1963, the day after JFK has been assassinated. Tree of Smoke follows the Vietnam war years through 1970, and then there's an add-on that happens in 1983, long after the war is over. The major character focus is William "Skip" Sands, a CIA PsyOps agent recruited by his uncle Colonel Frances Xavier Sands. At the outset, Skip views himself as a patriot, working on behalf of his country, but as the war winds on, he becomes ultimately disillusioned, eventually admitting that he "alternatively 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 F*ing American" (603). Skip joined his uncle’s coterie of groupies who follow the Colonel blindly. On index cards, he documents and catalogs information given to him by his uncle, but while he was in Vietnam, desperately wanting to put his training to work, he was kept out of the way at a dead physician's villa, where he "felt himself captured in a rainbow bubble of irrelevance." Skip realizes that he'd "come to war to see abstractions become realities. Instead he'd seen the reverse. Everything was abstract now." Hence the title: "Tree of Smoke" --the sense of obtuseness surrounding the Vietnam War for the characters in this novel, who all seem to work within different and changing frameworks of reality and deception. As the war continues, Skip unravels, finally giving up "working for the giant-size criminals," and going to work for "the medium size. Lousy hours and no fringe benefits, but the ethics are clearer." And it's not just Skip who breaks...the subplots are based on other characters who have to deal with how the war has affected their psyches and continues to do so after the war is over. An amazing book...it's going to be tough for me to top this one this year in my reading travels. I very highly recommend it. After reading this, I got the sensation that Johnson's portrayal of his characters caught up in the Vietnam War had them all stuck in some sort of cosmic PsyOps operation - in which, as one character notes, "we're on the cutting edge of reality itself. Right where it turns into a dream "(255). Simply outstanding. I can't praise it enough!”

• Rated 4 stars

“Hugely controversial but positively stunning in terms of scope and insight. Sure not every metaphor rings true and some of the prose misses the mark, but it quite a tale of adventure in SE Asia.”

• Rated 0 stars

“This book is about a man named Skip Sands who is in the CIA but later joins the military to help fight the war in vietnam. Its a sad book which tells abouut all the sadness in Vietnam through the eyes of Skip. The book tells about him being a POW, what his life was like after vietnam, what his life was like after vietnam, and what he did in Vietnam.”

• Rated 1 stars

“I thought this book was poorly written, despite all the honors. There is no discenrible plot and everything seems to be disjointedl WOuld not recommend it.”