A Modern California Dream, Still Haunted by Hippie Darkness

Credit…Robert Beatty THORN TREE, by Max Ludington 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,” 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 first-grader 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 […]