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Jan 26, 2011

Michelle rated it:

From this book I learned to carefully check materials before checking them out of my local library. When I saw Tree of Smoke on the shelf, I happily checked it out and couldn't wait to get it home and start reading it. I am a fan of Denis Johnson's work, and this was his first novel in about nine years.

When I flipped to the title page, there was what looked like a flattened booger on it. I really wanted to read the book so I quickly flipped the page and started reading anyway. A f More...

32 comments like (24 people liked it)

Mar 28, 2008

Joshua rated it:

I am not reviewing this book, as I consider myself to be utterly unqualified and am not sufficiently infatuated with my own sense of taste. I liked it. A lot. Hence the stars. There.

What I'm really delighting in right now, however, is how thoroughly unqualified B.R. Myers proved himself to be as well. His Atlantic Monthly review (found at: my link text) of "Tree of Smoke" is a display of such blind zealotry that I can't decide between crying out for him to be publicly More...

5 comments like (20 people liked it)

Aug 03, 2011

Chris rated it:

It's quite true that, from the United States' perspective, the Second World War was the last conflict that could be considered a feel-good success. Everything since has either yet to be concluded, or produced a stalemate or checkmate that provided, at best, a wan satisfaction; at worst, an inflamed and interminable bout of indigestion—and, of the latter, certainly none more painful and unsettling than those long years of struggle that encompassed the Vietnam War. To the nation that defended Sout More...

11 comments like (12 people liked it)

Jun 05, 2010

Jason rated it:

It's here folks!! How to Win the National Book Award for Dummies! Denis Johnson has pulled heavily from this publication for his novel Tree of Smoke. Let's highlight the recommendations he used to win the Book Award for fiction.

#3. Explore a topic of great controversy for the country and its people.
Johnson: the Vietnam War.

#6. Story must be sweeping, at least 500 pages.
Johnson: 614.

#7. Include at least 5 main characters with individual story More...

23 comments like (25 people liked it)

Dec 05, 2007

Jason rated it:

(My full review of this book is much longer than GoodReads' word-count limitations. Find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

So before anything else, a little history lesson...

From the mid-1800s until World War II, the Asian country now known as Vietnam was in actuality controlled by France and operated as a colony; during WWII, then, the Japanese invaded the area so as to install a Vichy-style fascist government. It wa More...

0 comments like (10 people liked it)

Feb 24, 2009

William rated it:

If you like an epic story this is for you. I wanted to give it 4 stars but the number of interwoven stories deterred me. I can see this being a plus for many. There are no heroes or saviors here. If you need at least one good guy in your novel you won't find one here. No matter how heroic they start out to be. If your of a certain age as I am when Vietnam and S.E. Asia were the every day topic of conversation then the amazing ability of the author to bring those headlines to life and put you ins More...

6 comments like (4 people liked it)

Nov 22, 2008

Diane rated it:

I must not be smart enough for this book because I didn't love it the way I know I should have. The critical reviews of this book were amazing--words like "masterpiece" were used often (see eg NYT review). To me, this novel felt like work, so much so that I had to take breaks and read the truly awful Sushi for Beginners just to get through it. The story is complicated because there are so many characters it becomes hard to focus on the so-called "main" ones. The narrative cha More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Feb 19, 2008

Alex rated it:

Tree of Smoke is something like a good, plot-driven thriller (like LeCarré more than Clancy) injected with a heady dose of fog of war. It's a novel that looks at the Vietnam War through a wonderfully tuned eye for the humane, a critical piece that has no truck with the cliché activisms we're used to. It's a novel about the human effects of fighting for abstractions. It's about forgiveness and salvation, about guilt itself in the face of the unswerving trueness of death. It's about what we do More...

3 comments like (5 people liked it)

Feb 21, 2009

W rated it:

First of all, TREE OF SMOKE is as similar to JESUS' SON as DUBLINERS is with ULYSSES. Compare a writer messing around with his experience and craft and an author who has come under the full blown power of his pen. One can also say TREE OF SMOKE is about Vietnam in the same way MOBY DICK is about whaling. I will wait until a second reading, but we may have our first great American novel since Faulkner and, in a certain sense, Dreiser.
“Tree of Smoke” is a more literal translation of the More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Jun 17, 2008

Phillip rated it:

Like many of you, I can't figure out why this book won the NBA. Not that DJ isn't a great writer, and parts of TOS are wonderfully constructed. But as a reader of hundreds of books on Vietnam and a three year all expenses paid visit there during the war, I didn't find insight into a darn thing, nothing new or meaningful. And I can turn and look at dozens of books on my shelf which are all of the above. And they didn't win squat. Obviously, some of you did.

Some of the comments (few a More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jan 28, 2008

Roderick rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Aug 25, 2007

Shauna rated it:

Hm. Let me back up here (back up, back up) because I'm not sure anyone wants to hear this.

It ain't all that.

There are big problems with some redundant characters and both flat writing and listless plotting in the opening chapters. Then it gets good. Then the last section kills. But I can't help but think that if this were a debut, I would not have persisted through the sloppier portions of it, and I really don't think epic is Johnson's game.

Now let me add More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 15, 2012

wally rated it:

this will be the 2nd johnson-denis for me...the other, nobody move and that recent, within the last six months or so. give or take.

last night at 3:00 a.m. president kennedy had been killed. seaman houston and the other two recruits slept while the first reports traveled around the world. there was one small nightspot on the island, a dilapidated club with big revolving fans in the ceiling and one bar and one pinball game; the two marines who ran the club had come by to wake them up a More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 04, 2009

John rated it:

I'm still not sure what I feel about this book. Frankly, after reading a number reviews here on goodreads I can sympathize with them all. So maybe that makes it a fascinating book. If you are wondering whether to put this on your list read 10 or so of the first reviews and you'll save yourself some time.

Yes this book IS about "Vietnam". You know the war. Another book 'Nam. And I think to compare it to other earlier novels on the topic is fair. But it's approaching 40 years More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Dec 10, 2008

Dennis D. rated it:

I don't usually read others' reviews before writing one of my own, but I had to in this case, because I figured I must have been reading a different book than everyone else. I picked this up in the first place because so many people liked it (National Book Award, numerous Top 10 lists for 2007, including NYT, Time, and EW). I rarely give up on a book, but I came close with this one a number of times; for instance, at page 300, 400, 500...even 600. I forged on, buoyed by all the acclaim and my More...

5 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 02, 2009

John and Kris rated it:

A rare review...

I prefer non-fiction...

Tree of Smoke, like Franzen’s The Corrections, was a Target impulse purchase because it won the National Book Award.

Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke won the National Book Award due to the fact that Johnson is, supposedly, a writer’s writer. If you or I would’ve submitted this long Vietnam era manuscript it would’ve been tossed in the trash heap by any publisher looking to earn a living because of its length and lack of focu More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 29, 2008

Ben rated it:

I admit I was biased toward this novel even before I opened it, due partly to prior admiration toward Denis Johnson and partly to the fact that this is the most beautifully designed book I own. I just want to hold it and look at it and rub it against my face.

That said.

Everything is accomplished in this book. The Vietnam War is approached from a variety of angles--infantry, tunnel rat, South Vietnamese fighter pilot, North Vietnamese agent, CIA operative, outsourced assa More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jul 05, 2008

Jill rated it:

I finally finished this amazing book. I am a fan of anything about the Vietnam war, you know, the first one we lost. That is what this novel is about, and naturally delves into each characters' "heart of darkness."
Denis Johnson paints unfiltered portraits of a general, a corporal, a marine, a navy newbie, VC's, CIA operatives, assasins on both sides, a volunteer nurse, a priest, a double-agent, a girlfriend back home, an ignorant mom- every possible character perspective of a wa More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Feb 22, 2008

Michael rated it:

Reading this book is a little like reading Don Delillo novel; it is so full of descriptive passages and internal mind-scapes that one could get lost reading a page after page, or lost, needing to go back wondering the thematic importance of the last excerpt. I sometimes can't bring myself to put it down and go to much needed sleep late at night, or cannot bring myself to pick it up because the enormity of it leaves me bewildered. I am beginning to think that this is, in part, due to the format o More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 15, 2008

Grant rated it:

I think I'm Denis Johnson's ideal reader in some ways--his first novel, Angels, and then his collection of short stories, Jesus's Son, are among my favorite books. So I was eager to read Tree of Smoke, especially after several reviews elevated it to masterpiece status and it was nominated for a National Book Award.

The novel is ambitious, but doesn't deliver. The things Johnson does so well--for example, his keen, poignant portraits of people desperately clinging to the edge of life- More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 03, 2008

Tripp rated it:

There are Tree of Smoke lovers and haters. Count me on the side of the lovers. The time shifts in the first section might make you think you are in for a trippy update of Dispatches, but the book quickly moves into a year by year account of the destruction of a number of American and Vietnamese lives.

The title represents a number of images and themes in the book. It references a verse in the Bible which a grizzled intelligence vet uses as a code name and a kind of mantra. The tree is More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 31, 2008

Christopher rated it:

Denis Johnson's NBA-winning novel reminded me of another major cultural event from last year -- Todd Haynes' Dylan biopic/mindfuck I'm Not There. Both are set mostly in the sixties, and both say less about the decade itself than about the sheen of fantasy that the subsequent years have applied to it. Both attempt, with the highest artistic intentions, to breath life into a tired form -- the Vietnam novel; the rock n roll biopic. Both contain a series of exquisite, even impeccable, gestures, p More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 09, 2007

Doug rated it:

It's hard not to be disappointed with a Denis Johnson novel. Something about everything he does allows it to be possibly the greatest writing thing to be ever written, but then he always sort of fucks it up.

This isn't any different. It's still great in a way, but for someone with an imagination as good as his he seems to get bogged down in facts, accuracy and boring things pitfalls like history. Of course the book has it's great points - showing the relationship between fear and b More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 18, 2007

Chad rated it:

I read the Atlantic Monthly's scathing review of this before buying it, and in retrospect it seems like an eminently unfair judgment of this fantastic book. No, this is indeed ambitious, but Johnson by and large pulls it off. It moves surprisingly quickly; I didn't find it particularly difficult to keep up with the vast mosaic of places and characters and chronologies and time frames; and it has an undeniable emotional heft. It would be worth a second read, and I think some day I may well go More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 12, 2007

Alex rated it:

Hmm.

That was the short deadened sound I made when I read the last line of this book last night. Not 'wow' or 'stunning' or 'masterpiece,' just a small involuntary expression of respect for the forces at work in this book that never fully materialize. Yes, it is about the soul -- and in the last hundred pages that word begins appearing with a striking frequency -- and yes, it is about the machine of war -- again, mentioned explicitly a number of times near the end -- but unfortunatel More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 15, 2007

Mike rated it:

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, but the thing was a mess--and not the good kind of disorienting, confounding, complicating mess, but an overheated yet undercooked kind of mess--in terms of its narrative. For every gra More...

5 comments like

Feb 26, 2009

Frederick rated it:

Any mention of the Vietnam conflict - or better, war - conjures a mood of calamity and heartbreak with little effort. In Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson paints a comprehensive picture of the characters caught in the pain and pathos of the terrible event. Military and civilian persons alike are well described as they find themselves enmeshed in the frustration of a war that has no victory, in which each struggles for her or his own truth in a fog of unrelenting uncertainty and hopelessness. I found More...

0 comments like

Dec 02, 2008

Andrew rated it:

Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke is the American literary novel at its best: absorbing, epic, challenging, meditative, marvelously poetic from one sentence to the next. To label this labyrinthine, relentless tale of an infantryman, sailor, CIA spook, ARVN officer, Vietcong double agent, and others a "Vietnam novel" seems to do it it a disservice. And yet, that's what it is: a devastating journey through the Vietnam War, to all the dark crevices of the American experience and the human c More...

0 comments like

Nov 19, 2011

John rated it:

This author was highly recommended by some literary heavyweights I respected (like Jonathan Franzen, the late David Foster Wallace) but admittedly, this book was long, disjointed and mixed. Having previously sampled some decent fare in Jesus' Son (a collection of short stories), I looked forward to a more focused, intense literary experience with this rather large book. Alas, it dragged on and on. Maybe a bit too much smoke, but perhaps that reflects the author's view of the entire misadventu More...

0 comments like

Nov 15, 2011

Lila rated it:

The writing in Denis Johnson’s novel “Tree of Smoke,” does not read like a stark, dead-eyed account you find in other war novels. I’ve read stories about Vietnam before, like The Things They Carried, and other war literature like All Quiet On The Western Front, in which the characters are already powerfully affected by the war when the stories begin. There’s hardly any talking. Nothing to say. Just the facts of their gritty reality, the sun rising and setting over life and death. Johnson starts More...

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