Tree of Smoke: A Novel

by Denis Johnson
Tree of Smoke: A Novel  
published 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
binding Hardcover
isbn 0374279128   (isbn13: 9780374279127)
pages 672
literary awards National Book Award 2007
description "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 t...more
date added
03-07-07



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John
John rated it: 5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars
05/03/08

Read in March, 2008
Tree of Smoke by Dennis Johnson is the finest novel about Vietnam or the Vietnam War I‘ve read and that includes books like Coming Home by George Davis, One to Count Cadence by James Crumley and The Quiet American by Graham Greene. The novel won the National Book Award and a bunch of other honors and deservedly so.

Trying to assemble a cogent review of this multi-layered elaborate book is difficult, there’s so much going on within so many levels among so many characters over a lengthy pe...more
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Joshua
Joshua rated it: 5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars
03/28/08

Read in March, 2008
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 zea...more
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Jason
Jason rated it: 4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars
12/05/07

Read in December, 2007
(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 was the Vietnamese...more
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Roderick
Roderick rated it: 5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars
01/28/08

Read in January, 2008
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
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  1 comments

Tripp
Tripp rated it: 5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars
02/03/08

Read in January, 2008
recommends it for: Literary fiction lovers, international relations students
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 used to...more
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Jesse
Jesse rated it: 5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars
03/29/08

Read in December, 2007
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
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Michael
Michael rated it: 3 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars
02/22/08

bookshelves: currently-reading
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
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Michelle
Michelle rated it: 4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars
05/11/08

bookshelves: contemporary-fiction
Read in May, 2008
recommends it for: Vietnam War Buffs
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 the page. I really wanted to read the book so I quickly flipped the page and started reading ...more
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W
W rated it: 5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars
04/14/08

recommends it for: anyone who has passed Am Lit 100 & 101
First of all, TREE OF SMOKE is to JESUS' SON as DUBLINERS is to 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 Hebrew be’a...more
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Alex
Alex rated it: 4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars
02/19/08

Read in February, 2008
recommends it for: anybody
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 w...more
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Chris
Chris rated it: 4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars
01/31/08

Read in January, 2008
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
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Melody
03/12/08

bookshelves: bookgroup, favorites, war
Read in March, 2008
The Vietnam War (or conflict as some might insist) came right on the heels of the “good war”. And young men went off to fight, hoping they were fighting for the same noble cause they thought their fathers fought for, but they only discovered that the “good war” was a myth. The basic rules of war – don’t kill the animals, don’t rape their women – were initially obeyed – but as they became men at the age of 18 they learned there were no rules. The repercussions of the evils of ...more
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Cjasper
Cjasper rated it: 4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars
02/08/08

bookshelves: my-books
Read in February, 2008
First, let me say it took me forever to read this book. I had to return it to the library, put a hold on it again, recheck it out, take a break to read a book for book group, return it, recheck it out...The entire time, my husband questioned why I was putting so much time into <i>this<i> book. I read The Name of the World a long time ago (when it was new?)and found it intriguing, but was not moved or greatly affected by it, and that was a much smaller investment.

So why did I ...more
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Damon
Damon rated it: 2 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars
02/25/08

Read in February, 2008
As a fan of Denis Johnson's earlier work, I found this book terribly dissapointing, especially in light of the many rave reviews it generated. In contrast to Jesus' Son, in which he manages to tell stories simultaneously powerful, funny and disturbing with such economy of language it seems he barely uses words at all, Tree of Smoke is so overloaded with unnecessary description it becomes a chore to plod through.

Such verbosity would not have bothered me if Johnson had created compelling, ori...more
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Alex
Alex rated it: 2 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars
11/12/07

Read in October, 2007
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 unfortunately it is ...more
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Michael
Michael rated it: 4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars
01/02/08

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in January, 2008
i was expecting to be completely blown away by johnson's new book, Tree of Smoke. it made it onto so many best of 2007 lists, and i have loved his previous works (resuscitation of a hanged man, jesus son, almost dead, and seek that i thought it couldn't help by killing.

well, it was really good, but i think a little ambitious. there are upwards of 8 characters in the book and the novel spans 20 years (1963-1983) and tackles a complex subject (America's invol...more
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Grant
Grant rated it: 2 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars
02/15/08

Read in December, 2007
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--don't q...more
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Maria
Maria rated it: 5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars
10/17/07

bookshelves: so-good-they-live-on-my-desk
Read in October, 2007
I carried this around with me for about three weeks, working my way through it, and I still know I'm going to have to go at it again. It's that amazing on a cellular level. On an overall level, same deal. It's devastating. Already Dead is one of my favorite books, but it's much harder to get into - it took me about a hundred pages of hallucinogenic prose, and finally I just let it take me. This is much more linear, only took about 60 pages, though it bounces between characters who have only tang...more
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Doug
Doug rated it: 4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars
12/09/07

Read in September, 2007
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 boredom i...more
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Benjamin
Benjamin rated it: 5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars
10/26/07

Read in October, 2007
"Sleepy stall women wrapped in light blankets beside wooden cases opened up to display boiled eggs, cigarettes, candy, sugar rolls. Timothy, are you alive? The woman at the stall beside me is weaving tiny boxes for party favors out of coconut leaves. Another woman goes by bent over a short broom, just a sheaf of straw, sweeping... May I always remember the truth I feel right now... Timothy, we live, we die."

"Not long after his lunch the roosters alone on neighboring small far...more
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book data (includes all editions)

avg rating (all editions): 3.79 (659 ratings)
avg rating (this edition): 3.79 (653 ratings)
number of reviews: 255