Tree of Smoke
by:
Denis Johnson (author)
Tree of Smoke is the 2007 National Book Award Winner for Fiction.One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the YearNamed a Best Book of the Year by Time, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon.com, Salon, Slate, The National Book Critics Circle,...
show more
Tree of Smoke is the 2007 National Book Award Winner for Fiction.One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the YearNamed a Best Book of the Year by Time, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon.com, Salon, Slate, The National Book Critics Circle, The Christian Science Monitor. . . .Tree of Smoke is the story of William "Skip" Sands, CIA--engaged in Pschological Operations against the Vietcong--and the disasters that befall him. It is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert and into a war where the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In the words of Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, Tree of Smoke is "bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war."
show less
Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780312427740 (0312427743)
ASIN: 312427743
Publish date: September 2nd 2008
Publisher: Picador
Pages no: 702
Edition language: English
I agree with reviewers who call this sprawling or confusing, but I thought both of these aspects contributed to a useful chaos and uncertainty that paralleled the war in Vietnam, the landscape traversed, and the clash of world views. The audiobook was infinitely easier than the novel since the speak...
I think I've gotta give this another go, with much more attention. I think I've been angry that every book isn't the revelation that _Jesus' Son_ was, and so my enthusiasm for them may be more muted than they deserve. Still, my read of this was that it worked like gangbusters on the sentence-level...