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.
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-year-old 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 ... 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 ... Ludington...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 ... 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...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.
The story ranges across time and place. The safety of a single first-person persona is eschewed in favor of a series of close-third-person viewpoints. Most challenging, perhaps, are the tragical-mechanical challenges of the plot. Unfortunately, Thorn Tree, like Daniel’s early attempts at sculpture, creaks and buckles under the weight of its contrivances ... latecomers disrupt the book’s established range of perspectives and further threaten its cohesiveness. Backed into a corner by the mechanics of his close-third-person style, Ludington is forced into flights of self-consciously purple description to explain how the cultists think ... A list of the book’s flaws overlooks passages of very strong writing, not to mention some lovely resonances and patterns that Ludington weaves skillfully into the narrative ... But in the end, he has to work too hard to smooth over the coincidences and plot machinations that drive Thorn Tree forward. It emerges somehow both half-baked and overdone; an inorganic assemblage, like the sculpture of its title, in which all the joins are visible.
Reading like time capsules, pages are laced with scenes from a Grateful Dead concert, lyrics by The Doors, and descriptions of LSD experiences. The characters’ personal stories are marked by addiction, abuse, and mysticism, and organically pose questions about love, trauma, art, and reality. Readers interested in 1960s counterculture and the psychological elements of character development will find this novel engrossing and ultimately suspenseful.
