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 “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.
