Johnson's 'Tree of Smoke' Wins National Book Award

Kirby joked about the poets' status relative to the other nominees. When poets get together, he said, they "sit around in black robes and hoods and plan to assassinate novelists."

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Finalists in young people's literature included Kathleen Duey ("Skin Hunger"), Kensington debut novelist M. Sindy Felin ("Touching Snow"), Brian Selznick ("The Invention of Hugo Cabret") and Sara Zarr ("Story of a Girl").

"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."

"To write a fat novel about the Vietnam War nearly 35 years after it ended is an act of literary bravado," David Ignatius wrote in The Washington Post. "To do so as brilliantly as Denis Johnson has in 'Tree of Smoke' is positively a miracle."

Johnson's work has won the admiration of fellow writers ever since he published his first novel, "Angels," a quarter-century ago. He remained relatively unknown to the broader public at least until his searing 1992 story collection, "Jesus' Son," which drew its material from the years Johnson lost to drugs and alcohol in his 20s.

Asked a few days before the awards to describe Johnson's writing, Lorin Stein, the editor who worked on "Tree of Smoke" at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, said it was hard to know where to start. Johnson is "religious-minded" and "concerned for the souls of his characters," Stein said, but he's also a realist who "writes about poor people in a way that makes you care about injustice."

Three of the five fiction finalists -- Johnson, Davis and Berlinski -- were Farrar, Straus authors. Stein worked with them all, but he was quick to deflect credit. An editor's investment with a book, he said, "no matter how intense," will be a matter of weeks or months and will lack the "cold sweat this-is-my-whole-life" feeling writers must live with for years.

Joan Didion -- who won the nonfiction award for "The Year of Magical Thinking" two years ago -- this year accepted a medal for "distinguished contribution to American letters."

Writers know how to write when they begin, Didion said. "What we learn from doing it is what writing was for." Then she recalled that she'd been at the National Book Awards two years before, when Norman Mailer received the same award she was getting now.

"There was someone who really, truly knew what writing was for," Didion said.

"Fresh Air" host Terry Gross accepted an award for "outstanding service to the American literary community." Comic writer Fran Lebowitz served as master of ceremonies for the second year in a row.