If you didn't know about the effects of white phosphorous before, you sure do now.Nightmare Fuel: Once our heroes enter Vietnam, things get very ugly.Though considering how James and other characters are either drunk or high (or both) a lot of the time, this isn't too surprising. Mind Screw: When shit gets weird, it gets really weird.Females Are More Innocent: Innocence which is then utterly crushed, particularly in Kathy Jones's plot thread.Skip Sands and the colonel are Type 1, at least at first, while many of the American soldiers are more Type 2. Eagleland: Definitely a mixture of both types.Door Stopper: About 700 pages long, depending on the edition.Cool Old Guy: Colonel Sands served in World War II, and despite now being a civilian is practically worshiped by his subordinates.Colonel Kilgore: Sergeant Harmon can come across as this.Cloud Cuckoolander: Sometimes Played for Laughs, other times for Surreal Horror.Born Lucky: Those who accompany him see Colonel Sands as invincible to an almost-supernatural degree.Black Comedy: Some of the soldiers' antics are this with a healthy dose of Mind Screw.Black-and-Gray Morality: And it's a fairly dark shade of gray.The Houston family as a whole is pretty messed up, really. In an ensemble of troubled protagonists, though, James Houston takes the cake. An Arm and a Leg: There's a soldier with a leg that got blown off, using crutches to get around.Tree of Smoke contains examples of the following tropes: Think Ulysses meets The Things They Carried. A bit zany in his antics, although trust us when we say he's one of the most sane characters in the entire book. The closest thing to a 'hero' the book has is Colonel Sands, a retired war hero who leads an operation in Vietnam with the help of the CIA. There's no single protagonist (although there are several related plot threads), the protagonists are deeply flawed at best and downright bizarre in their actions and motives at times. Despite being advertised as an epic novel about The Vietnam War, Johnson's work is about a lot more than just that.ĭue to its slow pacing, penchant for low-key dialogue, and horrifically dreamlike atmosphere, the book has become known for being somewhat divisive among readers. It is very long, very nightmarish, and almost too metaphysical for its own good.

Tree of Smoke is an esoteric war novel written by Denis Johnson and first published in 2007, winning the National Book Award for Fiction. 'Young men, while you live,' he told them, 'find out how to wake up from this nightmare.'

The tree of smoke