Jun 22, 2026 · 2 hr 18 min · 10 segments
Good Morning and please listen to me: TREE OF SMOKE is a Great American Novel, about war, espionage, fathers, sacrifice, depravity, and much more. The book’s central metaphor stands everywhere and…
Kevin KautzmanGuestNo entities detected.
Have you ever heard about Willie the Weeper?
It's strange entertainment, very long but very fast, a great whirly ride that starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder, loops unpredictably out and around, and then lurches down so suddenly at the very end that it will make your stomach flop.
That was by Jim Lewis, the book critic for the New York Times, when this book came out.
Tree of Smoke by Dennis Johnson was published in 2007 and won the National Book Award for Fiction, as well as earning the distinction of being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
In some senses, this book represents a radical departure for Johnson, a kind of one-off monster that sits uncomfortably among his other books, most of which are around 200 pages.
It is a novel that presents the stories of something like a dozen people in some way involved with the war in Vietnam, all related, at sometimes two or three steps removed, to Colonel Francis Sands, a wild-eyed idealist and legendary officer who has begun to prosecute his own intelligence war in country, complete with his own infantry division and recon unit, operating almost without parameters at all.
The specific goals of Colonel Sands are mysterious, even to his CIA agent nephew Skip Sands, perhaps the most prominent prospective character, but they involve gathering a master file of intelligence on Vietnamese people, a couple trunks of index cards that are given the name Tree of Smoke for reasons we'll get into, But they also include efforts to map the labyrinth of tunnels from which the Viet Cong carry out their brand of warfare, and from which the colonel seems to think the dark spirit of the land might be rested.
It's a war novel, a romance novel, a thriller, but also a chaotic and intimate attempt to make sense of the senseless, a subtly postmodern dissection of the murkiness of espionage in that strange country, and a reckoning with the spiritual destruction faced by so many who... who stared at the beast of the Vietnam War in the eye.
Have you ever heard about Willie the Weeper?
It's strange entertainment, very long but very fast, a great whirly ride that starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder, loops unpredictably out and around, and then lurches down so suddenly at the very end that it will make your stomach flop.
That was by Jim Lewis, the book critic for the New York Times, when this book came out.
Tree of Smoke by Dennis Johnson was published in 2007 and won the National Book Award for Fiction, as well as earning the distinction of being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
In some senses, this book represents a radical departure for Johnson, a kind of one-off monster that sits uncomfortably among his other books, most of which are around 200 pages.
It is a novel that presents the stories of something like a dozen people in some way involved with the war in Vietnam, all related, at sometimes two or three steps removed, to Colonel Francis Sands, a wild-eyed idealist and legendary officer who has begun to prosecute his own intelligence war in country, complete with his own infantry division and recon unit, operating almost without parameters at all.
The specific goals of Colonel Sands are mysterious, even to his CIA agent nephew Skip Sands, perhaps the most prominent prospective character, but they involve gathering a master file of intelligence on Vietnamese people, a couple trunks of index cards that are given the name Tree of Smoke for reasons we'll get into, But they also include efforts to map the labyrinth of tunnels from which the Viet Cong carry out their brand of warfare, and from which the colonel seems to think the dark spirit of the land might be rested.
It's a war novel, a romance novel, a thriller, but also a chaotic and intimate attempt to make sense of the senseless, a subtly postmodern dissection of the murkiness of espionage in that strange country, and a reckoning with the spiritual destruction faced by so many who... who stared at the beast of the Vietnam War in the eye.
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