#5. Tree of Smoke: A Novel
by Denis Johnson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
624 pages
$27.00

The most ambitious novel of the year, and one of the greatest, Johnson's massive, swirling, grotesque account of the Vietnam war seems to carry with it its own fog of war, a hallucinogenic fever-carrying mist that intoxicates the soldiers and spies and priests and innocents who breathe it. In Johnson's apocalyptic imagination the war becomes a ruinous drug the Americans fighting it can't kick.