The Fiction of Owen Thomas

The Lion Trees

A Novel

Summary – The shorter version

The Lion Trees is a work of literary fiction approaching 576,000 words. Its central characters are a family of five – the Johns—living in Columbus, Ohio in the year 2005. George W. Bush is well into his second term. The Iraq War is raging. Hurricane Katrina has landed. The Johns family is quietly, and then not so quietly, unraveling. In shades of Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the Johns family story, at turns dramatic and comic, is woven in four distinct narrative voices: Hollis, Susan, David and Tilly.

Hollis, the disaffected paterfamilias, simply wants some respect. He would like someone to acknowledge the quality of his character and the depth of his wisdom about the world. Is that so much to ask? Certainly it has not helped that after decades of loyal service as a commercial banker, Hollis finds himself callously nudged into early retirement by a merge-happy bank looking to make room for younger, shallower talent. He is home now, amid indistinguishable days, taking stock of his many attributes and exploring new pursuits to deepen his consciousness—like Buddhism, bonsai trimming, vibrational meditation and, increasingly, enophilia – pursuits that his family, and others lost in the fog of their shallow, media-driven narcissism, pointedly fail to appreciate. Relief, at last, comes with the sudden arrival of Suki Takada, the daughter of a powerful Japanese bank president in need of an escort on her tour of Ohio graduate schools.  Young enough to be Hollis’ own daughter, Suki is a kind of confirmatory narcotic, addictive and aphrodisiacal, offering herself up as an affirmation of everything Hollis marvels about himself. She will either return Hollis to the full potency of his lost youth or, as he races cross-country chasing ghosts of the past, strip away every last dignity and conceit until there is nothing left but the truth.

Hollis is not alone in the maelstrom of identity confusion. His wife, Susan, for instance, is waking up after forty years of marriage to realize that she has been living Hollis’ life, not her own. When a lesbian biker undertakes to reconnect Susan with a political past long abandoned, Susan must not only reevaluate her identity, but what and who in her life is worth keeping.

David, Hollis’ eldest son, is a high school history teacher trapped in the past. Teaching hopelessly incurious students at the very school from which he graduated, David wilts in the shadow of his father’s judgment and success. Try as he may, reason for optimism is elusive. It does not help matters when one of his students goes missing and David quickly becomes the unrelenting preoccupation of the Columbus Police Department. Proving his innocence – if that is possible—will require more than the help of Glenda LeVeau, his high-priced, colorfully embonpoint lawyer who just may be interested in sexually offsetting her fee. It will require more than the help of Lonnie Lumkin, a public defender who eats root vegetables out of his briefcase. Not even the inimitable Caitlin Carson Lewis, an out-of-nowhere, southern, pot-smoking hospice worker who drives a decommissioned ambulance and who seems to know David better than he knows himself will be enough to save him. David must save himself. Ultimately, he must plumb the depths of his own history, examining his childhood memories for the judgments he has sewn into the fabric of his identity, and that threaten to pull him beneath the surface.

Hollis’ only daughter, Tilly, does everything she can to live down to her father’s low expectations. Working in Hollywood as an up-and-coming starlet provides Tilly with ample opportunity to offend Hollis’ sensibilities and sharpen their long estrangement. Playing the “dead hooker” on bad television crime dramas, for example. And sleeping with her directors. That she is driven to do such things is beyond question. But exactly why is a mystery.

The path to illumination begins when Tilly receives an offer to play the role of Colonel Elena Ivanova in the screen adaptation of Angus Mann’s classic story, The Lion Tree. It is the role of a lifetime, not only because Tilly so powerfully identifies with Colonel Ivanova, but also because of her formative associations with two men behind the disaster-prone production. One of those men is acclaimed director Blair Gaines, who is determined to own Tilly, even if it means sacrificing the project. The other is Angus Mann himself, a reluctant consultant on the film, who seems to generally loathe the existence of Hollywood and its perversions of literature, including the very possibility that someone of Tilly’s reputation might inhabit his beloved Ivanova.

Tilly’s lifelong journey of self-discovery, forgiveness and redemption, threads its way from Ohio to California to Africa and back again, a path mined with all manner of salacious scandal of a kind that Hollywood and its ingénue starlets are very familiar. But no single twist of events in Tilly’s life will prove to be more revealing than the dark past that haunts the great Angus Mann and that wrought his most famous story. Ultimately, her work with Angus and Blair on The Lion Tree will raise for Tilly fundamental questions of the self, the answers to which will lead her back to Ohio, to her father Hollis, and to the secrets buried in the basement of her childhood home. Only there will she find her true self and confront the lion tree of her own heart.