Tiger in a Trance: A Novel [Hardcover]

Max Ludington (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 19, 2003

In the tradition of Robert Stone and Denis Johnson, a darkly authentic road novel set in the nomadic world of the Deadheads.

It is 1985, and eighteen-year-old Jason Burke is a full-time Deadhead, following the Grateful Dead around the country and surviving by selling T-shirts. But Jason is about to discover the lucrative ease of selling drugs. He’ll also meet the women who will play key romantic roles in his life: Jane, the tall, green-eyed girlfriend of a drug dealer; and Melanie, a rebellious high school girl, one-armed as the result of a car accident. Jason’s one-night tryst with Melanie sets the stage for their future before Jason takes off for California with the tour.
Jason has a past of his own. He grew up overseas, the son of a journalist, and when he was eleven his father was killed in a Syrian prison, accused of spying. Jason has never dealt directly with his father’s death, and his detachment has estranged him from his mother and his older brother.
In Carmel, Jason stops for the night to see Harry, an old friend of his father. He learns that Harry, a rock-and-roll-loving alcoholic, is dying of emphysema. Eventually, Jason falls into drug dealing in earnest; hits the road with Melanie; is pursued by private detectives; and returns to nurse Harry through his final illness, all the while battling his own increasingly serious heroin addiction. The end of the road is near.
Combining the high spirits of youth with the sometimes jaded wisdom of the counterculture, Tiger in a Trance is a startlingly sure-handed and accomplished debut novel that recalls such generational classics as Less Than Zero and The Beach. It shows how music, drugs, and especially love can be enchanting, and how the most bewitching things can also be the most bedeviling.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ludington revisits the magical, musical mystery tour that was the Grateful Dead in this rock novel-cum-coming-of-age story about a young man who joins the legion of fans that followed the band cross-country. Prep school dropout Jason Burke is the first-person narrator, dealing drugs, selling T-shirts and worshipping the guitar solos of Jerry Garcia on the group's 1985 tour. In a swirl of partying and sex, Jason pairs up first with Jane, the alluring girlfriend of a fellow dealer, then becomes more seriously involved with 17-year-old Melanie, a precocious, one-armed groupie. The novel turns darker when Jason learns that another brief rendezvous with a Dead fan has produced a child, and then darker still when he falls into the abyss of heroin addiction. The rock material is solid and colorful-Ludington affectionately but unsentimentally captures the Dead scene-and the portrayal of Jason's addiction is haunting, especially when he abandons an old family friend who is dying and wanders into a seedy part of the Bay area in search of a score. Jason, despite his aimlessness, is a serious, thoughtful character. His family history-his journalist father was killed in Syria when he was a boy-gives the novel extra depth, taking it beyond the tropes of the road novel. This is a searching, accomplished debut.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Jason, an 18-year-old high school dropout, spends his days crossing the country and going to Grateful Dead shows. He participates in the Dead underground economy, selling T-shirts, burritos, or drugs to earn money to get to the next performances. Dozens of peripheral characters float in and out of his life, sometimes resurfacing later in the plot, other times just there for the moment, but always laid back and seemingly carefree. But of course nothing remains free forever, and Jason soon finds his bills coming due. Then, a member of his circle gets 17 years in prison due to strict sentencing laws against selling LSD. Worst of all, Jason's dabbling in drugs has become a full-fledged heroin addiction. Ludington obviously knows his subject matter-even the smallest details, such as set lists and dates of shows, are exactly as they occurred. This nearly journalistic novel of the life of a Deadhead in the late '80s will continue to appeal, just like the Dead's music does.-Jamie Watson, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 386 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (August 19, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385507046
• ISBN-13: 978-0385507042
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1.3 x 8.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,576,492 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Who else has written about a one-armed girl?, October 1, 2003

By A Customer

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This review is from: Tiger in a Trance: A Novel (Hardcover)

If you are looking for a nostalgic rehash of Dead tour as a pure, utopic, mythical experience, this may not be the book for you. Let's just get that fact out of the way so that you won't be dissapointed when you open this novel and find the complex, multifaceted and realistic portrayal of the Grateful Dead scene that serves as the backdrop to this story.
The primary reason to read this book is for the characters. Melanie, the brassy one-armed runaway, is unique to the world of fiction, and counters Jason's charming naivety and wide-eyed trust in fate with her cunning and wit. Also serving as a foil to Jason is the ever-hacking Harry, who beneath the surly quips and malcontented one-liners is a generous and complicated man who never quite figured out what to do with himself, but left an interesting past trying. This novel explores the issues of loyalty and dependence among characters who are living in a universe in which there is no reliable moral yardstick, but who manage to maintain their sense of humanity regardless.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good, but left me wanting more, August 15, 2004

By 

Outside Looking In (New England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tiger in a Trance: A Novel (Hardcover)

Max Ludington has written a remarkable book in "Tiger in a Trance," his insiders look into the cult of the Grateful Dead.

There are lines that stopped me cold in this book, such as in the scene where the protagonist, Jason, has just administered a hit of killer dope and immediately makes for the toilet. "I read the legend inscribed at the top of the porcelain bowl: American Standard. I nodded my head, feeling, as LSD had taught me sometimes to feel, that wisdom was being imparted to me in ways I was only occasionally aware of."

One gets the feeling of what it was to be "on tour" during the mid `80s with the Dead. The drab sameness of American cities, the phenomena of a Hartford or a Worcester being transformed into a special place for the two days the Dead were in town, then returning to its mundane 9 to 5 existence. Ludington successfully renders the time and place perfectly in this book as he, quite believably, traces Jason's descent from rather privileged Deadhead lifestyle into serious drug use and the dangers that lifestyle entails. When Jason loses his pal Randy (who made their way through the tours selling t-shirts), he loses his moral compass - a point that is made clear late in the book when Jason remembers driving with Randy years before, heading to another Dead show at Alpine Valley, when a perfectly rendered bluegrass gospel song comes on the radio: "We listened not looking at each other, trying to contain the charge arcing between the music and the green triumph of the Iowa summer. We didn't talk about it afterward. The song ended and Randy shut off the radio, and we let it dissipate for a few miles."

I saw the Dead a number of times during the years Ludington describes and I can readily attest to the changes in the scene as the years went by, such as when "Touch of Grey" became so big and brought with it a lot of newcomers - I experienced this up in Maine at the Oxford Speedway shows - and the disappointing (to Deadheads, anyway) Dylan/Dead series of concerts. I never went `on tour' and only saw the Dead when they came my way (and never after Brent died) - so "Tiger in a Trance" gave me a good idea as to what was going on in the lives of all these people that I would see, that seemed to have found something in life worth getting excited about - no small feat in the America of the `80s.

What I was hoping for in this book, and did not quite get, was some examination of why the music of the Grateful Dead was able to take over the lives of so many people - why no other band had ever inspired people to changes their lives. I think I found the answer in a book on an entirely different topic when I read the following passage and the Deadheads I mixed with immediately came to mind: "Attended by a motley crew of men and women who were shockingly ordinary, unremarkable for intellectual acumen, social grace, wit or quickness..."

This description of first followers of Jesus, written by Donald Spoto in his book "The Hidden Life of Jesus," to me perfectly describes the fans of the Grateful Dead. When I ran into this passage in Spoto's book, it brought to mind a nascent thought that was beginning to gather steam - that Jerry Garcia was, in many ways, an American Jesus. Just as Christ's followers followed him from place to place to hear him preach, so did the Deadheads follow the Grateful Dead (mostly for Jerry) from place to place, hoping for the band's alchemy to spark and provide that window from which they would achieve a moment of grace, an awakening of the spirit within them, as a group, however fleeting it may have been (or fueled by the intake of narcotics).

America changed significantly when Jerry died. Something vital in its spirit was cauterized, and we will not likely see its like again in our lifetime. The magic of the Dead was the magic that is found in rare moments - when things suddenly come together and life makes sense, and the good Dead moments provided this magic in a way that is completely ineffable. The Grateful Dead played primarily to an audience that was, for the most part, incapable of examining closely what is was they were experiencing. They just knew when it was there and when it was not, and were very grateful for those moments when it was there.

Music alone provides the means be which we may get a glimpse of the spiritual nature that we know is inside of us (and which is buried entirely by the impedimenta of our day-to-day lives) and the Dead, despite their lapses and faults, were the only vehicle providing this window of opportunity for the masses. Bless the Deadheads, for they were the true seekers of our times, and Ludington's book gets close to nailing what is was like inside this peculiarly American quest for enlightenment.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars This Darkness Got To Give., August 30, 2003

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Zimi Ahzrix (Great Lakes, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tiger in a Trance: A Novel (Hardcover)

Max Ludington can write. The book is filled with quick and vivid descriptions. He also can handle a back and forth plotline. The story? Meh. A preppie deadhead quits school, hits succesive GD tours, meets women, loses friends, gets smack habit. While grounded in a darker reality the book still has a rather cliched approach to plot.
Perhaps I expected a more comical and swirling psychedelic narrative and was disappointed by the typical marijuana leads to heroin line.
Still I look forward to more from this writer.