Good morning and please listen to me: Denis Johnson is a true American artist, and “Tree of Smoke” is a tremendous book, a 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.

See also coverage in the LA Times, where David Ulin is less effusive, though still impressed:

He's not bad at heart, not exactly; perhaps a more accurate way of putting it is that standard considerations of good and evil do not apply.

This is writing that takes us right up to the edge and, indeed, beyond it, that casts us past the boundaries of ourselves.