Thorn Tree by Max Ludington

At the base level it’s fear. It’s all about fear. People ask, ‘What are you afraid of?’ and that is not an answerable question. Any time I name a source for my fear I feel it as a deflection. I mean, sure, I can get close. You know, as in: I’m afraid of people because someone I trusted fucked with me when I was a child. I was traumatized, yes, and the fear probably began there, I guess. But I don’t really know because it seems, now, somehow elemental. It embodies some ancient, sleeping doom, and the only escape is self-destruction. You know? Like, if I become my own doom I’ve taken that power away from anything else. It’s preemptive. At least there’s agency in it.”
She felt the laughter spill out of her in a rush. Its piercing volume was at odds with the moment and the release it brought. Leo looked at her dumbfounded.
“Get the fuck out of my head, man,” Celia said.

He had merely done what men had been doing since the primeval birth of jealousy. Just a spoon of love from my forty-five, save you from another man. Howlin’ Wolf was just singing about what thousands had wished they could do, and probably had done, before there were cops and laws and all the rest of the arbitrary bullshit. And it had felt good, hadn’t it?

Daniel is 68, living a quiet life in a Hollywood Hills guest house when a visitor repeatedly appears. Dean is six years old and clearly in need of companionship. He lives with his grandfather, Jack, on the larger house on the property. Jack is not always particularly attentive. And Mom, Celia, is a rising young actress who is often away on prolonged shoots. Daniel is happy for the company.

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Max Ludington – image from Macmillan – shot by Jennifer Silverman

The novel braids the stories of Jack, Daniel and Celia, mostly Jack and Daniel. The story takes place in multiple times, today being 2017, and the backstory stepping up from 1968 to the seventies, to 1980, and 1988. Celia is not a part of the earlier events.

The sixties events cast a light on a turbulent time, touching on many of the aspects one might expect, young love, drug-dealing, acid trips, communes, San Francisco, wth a very dodgy cult among them. But despite the surface level, there is also consideration of the sort of existential, philosophical searching that was, for many, an important part of those times.

Young Daniel (1960s) makes a youthful mistake and suffers a grievous wrong, which follows him all his life. In the 1970s he finds solace in the desert, constructing a significant work of art, the Thorn Tree of the title. It gets him some notice, gives him a way to express what is inside him, and leads to some stability in his life.

Celia did an image search for the sculpture, and there it was, standing next to the modern art museum, taller than the building itself. It was huge, with thick, meandering branches and bristling snakelike twigs. Most of the branches, while not attempting verisimilitude, were formed with inherently natural shapes and gnarled twists, but here and there some were deliberately hewn into shapes that could never have occurred in nature: curving double on themselves and then back again to form tight willowy S-shapes, or turning straight downward at acute angles for a foot or two before continuing up and outward, as if infused genetically with lightning.

Jack is a very different sort. A predator, a sociopath or something like it, Jack wants what he wants and is not much concerned about who he damages to get it. He is routinely unkind, and worse, but he is also a seeker of truth, becoming connected with a cult and seriously mulling the writings on which the cult bases its outlook, even if the tenets of that group serve to bolster his own self-justification.

Daniel and Jack are linked through these years, the source of that link being one of the mysteries of the book. Jack is definitely a dark force. Daniel exists on a brighter side, despite having made some bad choices. He is a character who grows. But while Jack grows in a way, his widened view of reality is ultimately redirected to his narcissism. Not much is really done with Celia.

There is some lyrical writing which gives the story texture, depth to the two main characters, which makes it engaging, and a look at the times, both 60s and 70s, which gives it some substance. In addition it considers repercussions throughout one’s lives of actions taken in our youth.

Daniel stood for a moment at the threshold of the branches and looked up. The wind was made louder here in contact with the tree. The gravel path went around the south side, and he followed it to where it ended at an overlook. There was a plaque on a post, but he didn’t read it. Instead of standing at the overlook and staring out to sea, as the landscape designer had intended, he turned and went in under the branches, and immediately the world of the tree took over. He was surprised—he’d thought his memory of it was hopelessly colored by LSD and shock and time, that he had probably falsely mythologized every aspect of it and it would be just a place, with soil and roots and air but not the indwelling spirit he’d imbued it with in his mind. But it was as it had been—the wind quieting and the light clarifying, damping the sun into deep greenness—inhabited by a sense of protection and safety unchanged by the years of foot traffic and human attention.

There are many more of this sort. The voice is omniscient narrator, which presents way too many opportunities to tell rather than show. But I doubt this will bother most readers. Some characters come and go, seeming to be throw-aways. It is one of the things that make the book feel over-long. I kept hoping that some of these might be given a deeper look, with Jack getting less.

The alternating timelines, a fairly typical literary device, made sense to me. The Grateful Dead offer a link between now and then. There seemed some interest in other literary devices. For example, a boy appears to have a magical relationship with birds, but the image drops after partial usage.

Thorn Tree is an interesting read, offering some substance, interesting characters, and a strong core mystery. But for a book that is not overlong, at about four hundred pages, it felt like a much longer read because of the excess attention paid to Jack, and some tangential tales. The descriptive writing (I am a sucker for that) gives one a reason to push through, however prickly the passage.

Review posted – 11/01/24

Publication date – 4/15/24

I received an ARE of Thorn Tree from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Ludington’s personal, Goodreads, and Twitter pages

Profile – from Macmillan

MAX LUDINGTON’s first novel, Tiger in a Trance, was a New York Times Notable book, and his fiction has appeared in Tin House, Meridian, HOW Journal, Outerbridge, and On the Rocks: the KGB Bar Fiction Reader. He lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches in the writing department at Pratt Institute.

Interview
—–The Palisades Newsletter – Max Ludington Reflects on His Second Novel, THORN TREE

Song
—–The Doors – Five To One
—–The Grateful Dead – The Very Best of the Grateful Dead