The Fiction of Owen Thomas

The Lion Trees

A Novel

Summary – The longer version

Ten years in the writing, The Lion Trees is a completed work of literary fiction approaching 576,000 words. Its central characters are a family of five – the Johns family—living in twenty-first century Columbus, Ohio. The year is 2005. George Bush has been reelected. 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 Johns.

If there is a center to the Johns family hurricane, it is its disaffected, unappreciated paterfamilias, Hollis. The world, it would seem, no longer values personal substance or wisdom. A commercial banker by trade, Hollis Johns resents his callous nudge into early retirement by a merge-happy bank looking to make room for younger talent. Hollis 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 others, lost in the fog of their shallow, media-driven narcissism, pointedly fail to appreciate.

Certainly Susan, Hollis’ wife of nearly four decades, has long since ceased to acknowledge her marital fortunes and is far more likely to remind Hollis of his failings as a husband and a father. The marriage is faltering on many fronts, incompatible values being only one. For instance, as Hollis is secluded in his basement den trying to deepen his consciousness, Susan is obsessing over the recent nomination of their daughter, Tilly, for a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. This, Susan insists, much to Hollis’ annoyance, is news that is worthy of broad dissemination among their family and friends.  There are people to call and parties to plan and Hollis must stop his nonsense and participate. It does not help matters that Hollis reserves a special and conspicuous disdain for the cesspool of celebrity culture, that his daughter has become a tabloid darling for sleeping with her directors, or that Susan blames Hollis for Tilly’s enduring estrangement from the family. Tilly has not spoken to Hollis in years and refuses to come home until Hollis consents to marriage counseling with Susan. Hollis’s oldest son, David, who is wasting his potential as a public school teacher, only seems to come around for help on the mortgage.

The respect and deference for which Hollis yearns comes, unexpectedly, with the arrival of Suki Takada, the daughter of Akahito Takada, a powerful Japanese bank president. When Akahito asks Hollis the favor of escorting his daughter on a tour of Ohio business schools, there is only one answer; after all, the request is an honor bestowed by one great and wise man to another. But Suki Takada is nothing like Hollis ever imagined. She is a sweet, dewy-eyed blonde, American born, who prefers the name Bethany and who concedes Hollis’ superior substance and wisdom with an enthusiasm that eclipses anything his family has ever shown. Young enough to be Hollis’ own daughter, Suki is a kind of confirmatory narcotic, addictive and aphrodisiacal, offering herself up as an affirmation that 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 dignity and conceit of his identity until there is nothing left but the truth.

Susan Johns.

Susan has spent her married life tending to her husband and to the demands of raising a family. It is not the life she had imagined back at Kent State University, where she had blossomed into a fiercely political consciousness, embracing the idealism and social-sexual mores of the day. She had been, back then, more of a mind to change the world than change the sheets and diapers. But young Hollis Johns, the charming outsider who would become her husband, had wooed her away from that path and down another; a path that would see the abandonment of a teaching career, the subordination of her identity to that of her three children, and her pledge of commitment to a man who would never acknowledged her sacrifice. Deferring against her better judgment, Susan had followed Hollis into a life not sufficiently her own. It will take nothing less than George W. Bush and the carnage of the Iraq War to bring her back to consciousness. But the road of rediscovery, she finds, is fraught with old pain and hard decisions, including what in her life, and who, she must sacrifice in order to reclaim her true self.

David Johns.

David, first born to Hollis and Susan, is a teacher of history hopelessly mired in the past. He works at the same high school from which he and Tilly once graduated.  But as his ferociously independent sister is rapidly becoming a Hollywood star, David feels like he is traveling in circles teaching rhymes about the year 1492. He cannot help but labor beneath the weight of disappointment that he has brought his parents, particularly his father, whose life-long example of single-minded ambition, industriousness and good judgment is a path David has steadfastly failed to follow. Witness, for example, David’s adolescent expulsion from a prestigious junior academy for getting caught in a bathroom stall with the principal’s daughter; or his choice of a New Orleans party college rather than a “serious” Ohio university as Hollis had insisted; or his decision to pursue a degree in secondary education rather than follow Hollis into something more lucratively business-minded. Not to mention David’s affinity for cannabis which, post college, is increasingly difficult to find and expensive to obtain.

While teaching history is something for which David has a genuine and abiding interest, his job provides him very little in the way of inspiration. Glib, incurious narcissism is a contagion. Even if he can occasionally detect sentience in his students, he is unable to find any grounds for optimism about the future. His textbooks offer only the fairytales of history and the school administration is more concerned with defending America’s sanitized identity than it is in actually educating. To make matters worse, David’s well-to-do paralegal girlfriend has left him, pornography has rendered his laptop a useless paperweight, he cannot make the mortgage payments he owes to his father, the word rapist now mysteriously despoils the passenger side of his Civic, and the school principal wants to fire him for teaching the truth about Christopher Columbus, Jesus, Al Qaeda and the Crusades.

Perhaps, then, it should not have been so surprising that when one of his students goes missing, 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. As his fate hangs in the balance, David must plumb the depths of his own personal 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.

Tilly Johns.

Matilda “Tilly” Johns, a successful novelist, lingers in a coma at the end of a long life. It is 2065, sixty years since Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans. A hurricane that the news has taken to calling Katrina’s Mother is spinning its way into the gulf, preparing to repeat history. From her Columbus hospital room, Tilly recalls a life of poor choices, driven by subconscious forces she did not understand.  As a young English Lit major, Tilly abandons her family and Ohio for Los Angeles, likely the last place Hollis would have allowed had it been up to him. There, Tilly writes for a literary review and waits tables with out-of-work actors and the cleaner fish of the entertainment industry. Eventually, the gravitational pull of Hollywood is too great to resist and she falls prey to those who would provide one opportunity after another for her to live down to the worst of her father’s expectations. With Hollis and all of Ohio bearing witness, Tilly sleeps her way onto the tabloids, bad crime television, and a string of low-budget horror films.

Tilly’s fortunes change rather dramatically with a co-lead role in an independent film that catapults her into a far more respectable spotlight. It is at that precarious juncture in her career that 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 and executive producer, 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 reminiscence recounts a lifelong journey of self-discovery, forgiveness and redemption, threading its way from Ohio to California to Africa and back again. It is a journey populated by Tilly’s family, Hollywood’s elite and its servant class, the media, the police, the Los Angeles underworld, talent agents, directors, lovers, husbands, lawyers, legends and ghosts. Each of the mileposts on that journey – including her tragic and highly public relationship with a Hollywood heartthrob, a secret sex video, a dangerous kinship with a 1930’s starlet long dead of suicide, and a criminal investigation into a designer drug trafficking ring – bring Tilly ever closer to understanding the identity she has been serving at her own expense. 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.