Set largely in the 1960s, this loose, sprawling novel tracks numerous characters into the mythical heart of American darkness: the Vietnam War. Tree of Smoke, which won the National Book Award for fiction, is a searing vision of a world without shores.
When would he strike out for shore? When would he receive the gift of desperation? But this morning in particular he felt like a man overboard far from any harbor, keeping afloat only for the sake of it, waiting for his strength to give out. He’d lived almost twenty-five years, his hardships colored in his own mind as youthful adventures, someday to be followed by a period of intense self-betterment, then accomplishment and ease.
Late in Denis Johnson’s novel, one of his many defeated, aimless characters, Bill Houston, surveys what Johnson elsewhere calls “the cancelled life”:
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