Thorn Tree
A Novel
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"Terrifically vivid. . . stirring." - New York Times
A beautifully wrought novel on the aftershocks of the heady but dangerous late 1960s and the relationship between trauma and the creative impulse.
Now in his late-sixties, Daniel lives in quiet anonymity in a converted guest cottage in the Hollywood Hills. A legendary artist, he’s known for one seminal work—Thorn Tree—a hulking, welded, scrap metal sculpture that he built in the Mojave desert in the 1970s. The work emerged from tragedy, but building it kept Daniel alive and catapulted him to brief, reluctant fame in the art world.
Daniel is neighbors with Celia, a charismatic but fragile actress. She too experienced youthful fame, hers in a popular television series, but saw her life nearly collapse after a series of bad decisions. Now, a new movie with a notorious director might reignite her career.
A single mother, Celia leaves her young son Dean for weeks at a time with her father, Jack, who stays at her house while she’s on location. Jack and Daniel strike up a tentative friendship as Dean takes to visiting Daniel’s cottage--but something about Jack seems off. Discomfiting, strangely intimate, with flashes of anger balanced by an almost philosophical bent, Jack is not the harmless grandparent he pretends to be.
Weaving the idealism and the darkness of the late 1960s, the glossy surfaces of Los Angeles celebrity today, and thrumming with the sound of the Grateful Dead, the mania of Charles Manson and other cults, and the secrets that both Jack and Daniel have harbored for fifty years, Thorn Tree by Max Ludington is an utterly-compelling novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ludington (Tiger In a Trance) delivers a vibrant narrative of art, love, and the lingering damage of 1960s excess. Daniel Tunison, a retired schoolteacher in Los Angeles, briefly became famous in the 1970s for his sculpture "Thorn Tree," a massive scrap metal construction in the Mojave Desert. The nonlinear narrative delves into Daniel's painful source of inspiration for the piece. At a 1969 Grateful Dead concert in San Francisco, his girlfriend, Rachel, runs into an ominous figure from her past, and she and Daniel flee the show. On the way back to L.A., they pull off the highway and find refuge under a tree, which, in their LSD-fueled haze, seems to exude mystical powers. The events that follow are murky, and the night ends with Rachel falling from a cliff to her death. Daniel then serves a brief prison sentence for trafficking LSD, and after he gets out, he builds the sculpture in homage to the tree under which he last saw Rachel. In the present, Daniel befriends his new neighbor Jack Dressler, who is prone to alcoholic rages and reveries of his time in a 1960s cult. One day, Jack menacingly implies to Daniel that he knows what happened to Rachel. From there, Ludington rachets up the suspense as Daniel and Jack's encounters build to a reckoning and a dangerous showdown. Readers won't want to put this down.
