Long Strange Trip
Cult leaders, curdled 1960s idealism and outsider art collide in this prismatic novel.
FOR EVERY IDYLLIC IMAGE of the 1960s there exists its dark inverse, a symbol of menacing chaos. Give me your flower crowns at Woodstock, your free love in Haight-Ashbury, and I’ll hand you the murdering Manson family, or the 5-yearold in Joan Didion’s “Slouching Toward
Bethlehem,” high on the LSD her mother gave her. This slippage of the utopian into the dystopian lies at the heart of “Thorn Tree,” Max Ludington’s ominous second novel.
It’s 2017, and Daniel Tunison lives alone in the Beverly Hills guesthouse he inherited from his friend Cam. Daniel, 68, is a retired schoolteacher with an adult son he rarely sees, and, to make the most of his days, he’s a volunteer tutor at an after-school program. He leads a quiet, prescribed life, but the new occupants of Cam’s mansion are about to upend his careful existence.
Celia Dressler, “a young movie star fresh out of rehab number two and a round of tabloid thrashings,” now lives in that house up the hill with her son, a firstgrader named Dean, and her father, Jack. When the novel begins, she is in Arizona shooting an epic film and Jack is taking care of Dean. Or he should be. From the start, it’s clear that Jack, visiting Daniel one evening with a bottle of whiskey and a slew of prodding questions, isn’t to be trusted. He wants more from his neighbor than Daniel can imagine.
The novel skips around through multiple characters and time frames, asking us to make connections and comparisons, to note how the past persists in the present. We visit Celia on the set of a “surrealist, sci-fi ‘Anna Karenina’ reboot,” which she hopes will reinvigorate her career, and help keep her sober.
Then we swing back to Daniel in art school in 1968, when he meets and falls in love with a woman named Rachel. Rachel’s sudden death, following the couple’s first LSD trip at a Grateful Dead show, alters the course of Daniel’s life. It’s Rachel’s death that the novel swirls around, a traumatic event that will, decades later, bind Daniel to Jack. It also explains Daniel’s past as a famous outsider artist. While the descriptions of late-1960s drug use and Northern Californian commune life are terrifically vivid, the most remarkable passages in Ludington’s novel describe what drives Daniel, in the mid-1970s, to construct a massive tree from scrap metal. At first, he doesn’t understand his impulse to create; it begins with a “a pinhole in his gloom — distant, but real.”
Over time, his art becomes a way to negotiate his grief and confusion regarding the loss of Rachel. If building his tree can’t translate and rid him of his pain, then the act at least makes his life bearable, and legible. “Each design on each leaf seemed to exorcise an individual thought,” Ludington writes, “thoughts that could now go straight from his subconscious to the chisel without troubling his conscious mind.” There are multiple instances in
Ludington is hellbent on exploring what, beyond art, human beings might do with their messy feelings.
“Thorn Tree” where art is offered as a conduit to — or toward — revelation, connection, purity. Art can expunge what Celia calls the “core fear” inside.
But Ludington, whose previous novel was the similarly acid-soaked “Tiger in a Trance” (2003), is hellbent on exploring what, beyond art, human beings might do with their messy feelings. We can destroy as well as create. The riskiest element of “Thorn Tree” is the attention it gives to a monstrous man; he might be too repugnant for some readers. Jack is one bad dude, and yet what haunts him is as compelling as the grief that stalks
Daniel. Daniel doesn’t understand why he creates his tree, just as Jack struggles to articulate why he hurt another person. No matter how badly Jack wants to recast his victim as the perpetrator, the math doesn’t work, he can’t compute it, and he suffers. His victim remains a victim — and, it must be said, that’s all the book allows her to be.
If there’s a misstep in the novel, it comes in the final third when a bygone cult, a bit of background in Daniel’s story, takes a more central role. While “Thorn Tree” deftly fictionalizes painting, sculpture and film, and conjures real-life music on the page with stirring specificity, its treatment of the cult is harder to connect with. The original cult members, led by a man named Hugo, wear white and speak of transforming into a “self-guided missile [to] reach the Destination.” Even within the world of the novel, the ideas that ignite Hugo’s followers past and present are half-baked and murky; it’s like a joke you had to be there for.
As the book grows more interested in a new minor character who’s enthralled by Hugo’s legacy, the themes of trauma and the past, of creation and destruction, become less urgent. This new focus requires that the narrative neglect the story lines of other characters I was invested in, and I felt confused when they were relegated to the background. I was no longer sure what mattered in this universe. Its power was deflated.
Nevertheless, I was enthralled to the end by this novel’s willingness to wrestle with the dangerous impulses within us. With “Thorn Tree,” one sees how utopia becomes dystopia, grief becomes art, the creator becomes the destroyer, and how love, to a monster, twists into hate. The story is less a kaleidoscope than a piece of glass shattered into a thousand deadly pieces. Those shards will cut you.