"Tree of Smoke" wins National Book Award

Denis Johnson, author of the Vietnam novel, “Tree of Smoke,” won the National Book Award for fiction Wednesday night.

According to the Associated Press:

New York Times reporter Tim Weiner won the nonfiction award for “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.” Robert Hass won the poetry award for “Time and Materials.”

Sherman Alexie won the award for young people’s literature, for “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.”

“Tree of Smoke” was widely considered the front-runner for the fiction award. Lauding Johnson’s novel as a “conventionally satisfying but formally daring masterpiece,” Harper’s reviewer John Jeremiah Sullivan described it as “a 614-page multigenerational, transnational, braided morality saga about Westerners in Southeast Asia and the Southeast Asians who have to figure out how to stay alive around them.”