Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson may be the greatest American writer who is not generally known to the reading public. Tree of Smoke should change that. It's a big book, in terms of weight, as it's just over 600 pages, and in terms of its setting: the Vietnam war. It starts in 1963, just after Kennedy is shot, and ends twenty years later. Oh, and it's just won America's National Book Award. The plot follows a large number of characters during the course of the Vietnam war and beyond, but the moral center of the book is one Skip Sands, who gets drawn into a CIA operation called Tree of Smoke. This exercise may be valid, but it seems likely that it's only useful to those who are running it, people who are unavailable for questioning. In this sense, it's the War in microcosm – and by 'the War' here, read 'most wars'. Outwith the black-ops the book depicts a specific situation on the ground, drawing a convincing picture of Vietnam through the inclusion of some well-realised Vietnamese characters. Johnson's prose has been criticised on occasion for complexity, but Tree of Smoke only gradually becomes complicated, and by then it's no bad thing. Probably the most important big book since Don DeLillo's Underworld.