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.

President Kennedy had been killed') to 1970, gets its own part, followed by a coda set in 1983. 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. As with all of Johnson's work the stories in Jesus' Son, novels like Resuscitation of a Dead Man and Fiskadoro the real point is the possibility of grace in a world of total mystery and inexplicable suffering. Jimmy Storm, whose existence seems to be one long vision quest. SignatureReviewed by Michael CoffeyIf 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. Tree of Smoke is the 2007 National Book Award Winner for Fiction. Tree of Smoke is Denis Johnson's first full-length novel in nine years, and his most gripping, beautiful, and powerful work to date.

In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God, this is a story like nothing in our literature. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. This is the story of Skip Sands-spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong-and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the F*****g American.

Book tree of smoke