I wrote for the Charleston City Paper from the Summer of 2000 to early 2004 and, therefore, have a truckload of book reviews and essays that I want to archive online. I've already posted a few of these items, but I plan on posting them with more regularity, in addition to the new posts Leah and I write. In fact, here's one now......
Sex, drugs and rock-n-roll: a cliché perhaps, but Max Ludington's first novel, Tiger in a Trance, is anything but formulaic. Its story revolves around Jason Burke and his cross-country travels following the Grateful Dead. The late George Plimpton compared Ludington's novel to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and his comparison was accurate; Tiger in a Trance is more accessible, however, and free of Jack's stream-of-consciousness ramblings. The title of the novel is taken from the Grateful Dead's Saint of Circumstance - I'm still walking, so I'm sure I can dance / Just a saint of circumstance / Like a tiger in a trance - and the song's lyrics aptly describe Jason Burke, Ludington's Whitman-quoting, jazz-loving, drug-taking, soul-searching protagonist - a high school dropout who tries to expand his mind with transcendental literature, chemically-altered states of mind, and Jerry Garcia.
Jason and his deadhead friends view the tour, the Dead, and themselves as an extended family, and Jason thinks that the "beautiful thing about the tour was that we were always headed home." They were always headed to coliseums and amphitheaters - "The country was full of hollow cathedrals...then we came and filled them up for a night or three, made them shine." Through wafts of smoke and an acid haze, Jason and his friends soak in the Dead's music. "The drugs and love and sex and craziness were crucial, but it was this lenslike quality of the music...that drew us back again and again, and created among us a vortex of expectancy, obsession, and ritual."
After the shows, Jason's pseudo-family hangs out, deals drug, does drugs, and spouts off the occasional profundity: "I subscribe to the idea that all property is theft...I say this not as an indictment of property, but as an argument for the inevitably of theft." The pot and acid expand Jason's mind and eventually expand into heavier drug use. Early in the novel Jason speaks about drugs romantically - "there was a fuzzy quality that came in the acid's wake, everything soft and exact and sadly real" - but as his story progresses, the drugs get harder and the romanticism fades. When cocaine and heroin enter Jason's life, his life becomes cocaine and heroin. Strung out and addicted, he no longer revels in the Dead's music; he just joneses for drugs.
Jason rounds out the drugs and rock-n-roll with women and eventually becomes torn between two girls; between great sex and a substantial relationship; between Jane and Melanie. Jane and Jason have a deep sexual connection, but nothing more. Jason sums up their relationship as such: "The things that I talked about - jazz, Zen, books - brought on a blankness of eye and hurriedness of speech in her...so we fucked a lot, made a fantastic game, a language, out of it." A language that faltered after orgasm.
Jason's relationship with Melanie (a rich, one-armed, seventeen-year-old beauty), however, has deeper roots. Deeper meaning. But heroin and circumstance fight against them, and their relationship becomes strained. As the relationship falters, Jason's life crumbles. Drug-related murder, the death of friends, and deep addictions replace love, Garcia riffs, and transcendental life.
With plot twists, real-life problems, and descriptive prose, Max Ludington's freshman novel delivers. Tiger in a Trance is surprisingly good and refreshingly original. When you mix the Grateful Dead, cross-country travels, Walt Whitman, death, one-armed love, drug use, and good writing, how can you possibly go wrong?
