Tree of Smoke: A Novel (edit title)

• 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.”

• Rated 4 stars

“Just finished it. I put it down at about page 450 and then it took a while to pick it back up. But a good read. I love the way the narrative progresses by happenstance.

I carry this interview with me that Denis Johnson gave the NYTimes about this book. It gave me great hope when I was feeling blue. Here is the interview in whole:

Q: What drew you to the story?
DJ: I have no idea.

Q: How does the book compare to other prose you have written?
DJ: It's longer and, despite what anybody says, more conscientiously plotted.

Q: Were there moments in your writing process where you worried the book wouldn't work? If so, how did you press on?

DJ: Well, I've never thought about this before, but now that you ask, it occurs to me I don't have much interest whether any of my books work or not.

THAT'S THE WHOLE THING.

It's like Jesus' Son in Vietnam, in many ways...”

• Rated 5 stars

“This one is truly deserving of its' critical praise. A gripping tale mixed in a complex web of psychology, history and character depth, yet not to a degree in which the storytelling is corrupted. You emerge from this a little bit jaded yet a few iq points up.”

• Rated 0 stars

“Amazon review: 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 Hanged Man and 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 Smoke has a flaw, it is that some characters are virtually 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. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.”

• Rated 0 stars

“This book was very well reviewed so I got it from the library. I really didn't like it, in fact I read almost all of it and then just never finished it, I really didnt care.”

• Rated 2 stars

“Perhaps I missed the point here, but I just don't understand how this won the National Book Award. It was about 400 pages too long, there were way too many characters, and not enough glue to hold it together. I got to the end and didn't actually understand the point of the book.”

• Rated 5 stars

“Is this the finest Vietnam novel out there?”

• Rated 2 stars

“Even though at times I felt I was plowing through this book, I was interested enough to finish it within a week. The dialogue was difficult, too, as I often didn't know who was speaking, and I really just think parts of this went over my head. I have read many books set in Vietnam, and this one had some of the most poignant "little" scenes I've read. ”

• Rated 3 stars

“Good. but not as good as the hype. beware the hype."”