Books › Tree of Smoke
National Book Award for Fiction 2007
Tree of Smoke
A Novel
First published 2007 · 896 pages
A feverish, sprawling descent into the moral and spiritual chaos of the American mythos.
What it feels like
Reading this mammoth odyssey feels like being pulled into a humid, hallucinatory fever dream. It is a sprawling, meandering epic that demands patience, rewarding the reader with a deeply unsettling exploration of spiritual ruin and moral ambiguity. The prose is muscular and darkly poetic, capturing the chaotic, drug-addled reality of a world where the lines between friend, enemy, and sanity are entirely blurred. You sit inside an oppressive, dread-soaked atmosphere, surrounded by a cast of deeply flawed, unraveling characters who are swallowed whole by the mythos of war. It will delight readers who crave challenging, visionary literary fiction and who do not mind having their hearts and minds dragged through the gritty, surreal mud of history.
- Mood
- feverish
- oppressive
- surreal
- dread-soaked
- chaotic
- Tone
- hallucinatory
- cynical
- philosophical
- gritty
- bleak
- Pace
- meandering
- Themes
- moral corruption · the fog of war · spiritual ruin · myth-making and delusion · loss of innocence
- The writing
- Muscular, darkly poetic, and frenzied, weaving gritty realism with surreal, drug-addled visions.
- The arc
- Begins in a state of naive ambition and slowly unravels into profound, hallucinatory despair and spiritual exhaustion.
- Who it's for
- Devotees of sprawling, challenging literary epics who appreciate dark, philosophical explorations of war and the human psyche.
Content notes
- graphic violence
- drug addiction
- war trauma
- gore
- suicide
About the book
This mammoth odyssey about the Vietnam War transcends all other attempts to write about Vietnam, and makes them look like Hallmark greeting cards. It follows Skip Sands, working for the psychological operations department of the CIA, and his larger than life uncle “Colonel Sands”. It takes us everywhere in Southeast Asia, and even back to the United States. Johnson depicts a war where nothing is clear, where friends and enemies are indistinguishable, and where myths are created out of the land itself.
With a cast of half-a-dozen supporting characters, he portrays the war from the perspective of both sides of Vietnam, from two G.I. brothers from Arizona (who appeared in Johnson’s Angels), from a widowed Canadian nurse who can’t stop reading Calvin, from a Sergeant who seems to be perpetually tripping on acid, from a German hit-man, from a priest in the Philippines who thinks he’s Judas, from a “civilian” war-hero Colonel who’s trying to implement his own unorthodox campaign against the Vietcong.
Spanning thirty years, and over 700 pages, it’s still a disappointment when you arrive at the last page. This is Johnson’s masterpiece – a book you can imagine him writing under a succubus’s spell in a fallout shelter—hair long, unshaven, chain-smoking, frenzied to get the words out.
Description from Open Library.
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