Story Statement
By the spring of 1960, Hank has become the Good American he was raised to be and chose to be. But day by day, year by year, the city he covers as a journalist for the Pittsburgh Press is challenging his perspective of what it means to be both good and an American. Ollie, a woman bartender he meets in a gritty part of the changing city causes his conflicting understanding of who he is in the world around him to take on an urgency in his thoughts and his actions. While he was growing up among the elite of Pittsburgh steel, she was struggling with her family for food in a Latvian ghetto and eventually fighting for survival in a concentration camp.
Young and self-willed, but with very different pasts, they share a pride in being part of an American steelmaking city, while also a false hope her crumbling urban neighborhood in the city is their protective space. Foremost, they sometimes share, sometimes battle against a love for one another that alters them to the core of their identity, transforming what brings their lives happiness and purpose.
The Antagonist
Olga “Ollie” Salesman sets all the rigging and lets out all her own sail, and anyone who wants to sail beside her must steer a course she sets, even if she obliges them with small tilts of the direction along the way. She grew up in the oppression of a ghetto and then a concentration camp prior to being brought to 1950’s America. Her wounds are her memory of human cruelty and her own wantonness for food for years combined with her shock of materialism that creates in her a puritan distain for most of the people around her.
Life is the gratification of the senses by sex and flavorful comfort food that is pleasing to taste and to her stomach. Sex is a pleasure to her skin and an act of conquest carried out with mutual fun and a level of kindness, but she aims for little more. Yet, she is not perfect in her aims. She continues to find in her an emotional empathy getting in the way, causing unexpected turns of course to those who are drawn in by her allure and free-spirited personality. Her character is powerful but not predictable, and therefore is at times destructive.
Title
THE LION’S FEAST
CITY OF STEEL AND DUST
THE NEWSMAN
Genre & Comparable
Historic Fiction
Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novels share a relationship focused narrative involving characters in sexual relationships that are forced to deal with unfaithfulness in themselves and in those they love. These tensions are central to Maybe in Another Life, and After I do. Like Hank, the protagonists in these novels are seeking to be trustworthy and kind, but still acting in ways that are at times very hurtful to those closest to them. Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six has a historical setting at its beginning similar to The Lion’s Feast in both time and space as well as the tension of unfaithful love among the main characters, even though the frame is substantially different.
Philip Roth’s novel Indignation and The Lion’s Feast share both a similar time period in American history and a strong and wounded antagonist that drives much of the action and internal strife in the main character. The novels portray a protected but fearful America and a broader, more dangerous America beyond. Also like many of Roth’s novels, sex is one of the central actions driving the two main relationships in The Lion’s Feast. Though not often fleshed out in detail in the novel, nothing makes any sense without its importance to both the protagonist and the antagonist.
If one wanted to line up novels on their shelf by time period in American history, and had all three of these books, they would put Indignation on their left, The Lion’s Feast in the middle, and Daisy Jones and the Six on their right. Together they show the ending of an outwardly clean-cut and conformed America in the 1950’s through to the much more shaggy and outwardly chaotic and sometimes “lost” America of the 1970’s, with The Lion’s Feast covering the early 1960’s. Regardless of these rapid social changes, the struggles and pleasures of the characters’ intimate relationships share a similarity in all three. These novels all deal broadly with the internal strife human relationships cause us, and the cost verses reward of commitment and pleasure. More comparatively, they deal with unfaithfulness and the impact of deep-set hurts caused by others prior to the relationships central to the novels within connective American times and places.
Logline
Their love story begins as the age of Industrial America is ending. In a city made by steel and coal, a Holocaust survivor and a Sottish “blueblood” of the Pittsburgh elite sometimes share and sometimes battle with all their might against an awaking of who they are and what they want out of life.
Conflict: Primary & Secondary
Henry Wood’s conflicting love for Ollie and Anna drive the narrative forward, from the phone call in 2016 that begins the frame of the novel, to the closing moments on the final page. He strives to reconcile himself, resign himself, and reinspire himself at different times in the novel to these two women he cherishes in very different ways. His conflict is foremost internal, in his discovery of what kind of man he is or what kind of man he should be, how to respond to these two women who are eager for his time, what kindness is, and what integrity a man can have while lying straight-faced to his wife he claims to respect and believes he loves. He is conflicted by the pleasure he finds, and the lack of guilt or destruction his actions cause him. He is in conflict over what life is supposed to be about.
Wood is in conflict with a city still segregated by race and class. He is in conflict with a government that continues to demand more and more of him for the cause of fighting communism. He is in conflict with a police department that often acts under the principle: the end justifies the means. He is in conflict with his boss over the political slant of the paper. His is even in conflict with the paper he works for over the way he wears his hair. Henry Wood’s smooth words, natural smile, and White, upper-crust background have gained for him his ability to be in conflict with nearly his entire world, but still accepted by it. He is among those who have a disproportionate share of the city’s wealth and position, but he wants more. He wants to build upon his successes and expand his life’s greatest pleasures. All his conflicts stem from these two burning and active passions within him. His conflicts are evidences of his desire in action, and he is very much a man of action in the early 1960’s.
Setting
The setting is a gritty, sooty industrial city: humid in the summer heat of the Ohio Valley, coal dust covered snow and slush in winter, often overcast from the moisture off Lake Erie in the spring and autumn. It is a cityscape of steel, brick, and stone, and also of blooming spring flowers and lush green parks shaded by old deciduous trees. The hum of steel making and coke burning, the orange glow of the forges, the rumbling of the carts on the old brick streets amid the fabrication shops, the forceful chugging of the loaded trains pulling out of the mills are some of the distinct features of the city that have provided the steel for the United States of America to win the Second World War. A population of Southern Blacks, Eastern Europeans, and well-established Scottish American families dwell in the valley of the three rivers and on the heights. The setting is the press and information gathering and writing focused newsroom in this industrial city. It is the out-of-town outdoor park where class and race mix, the street parties in the ethnically and racially segregated urban neighborhoods under lights strung on brick streets between brick flats. It is the scene of a murder in a dim lit parking lot and back hall. It is the manicured lawns and shrubs in the neighborhoods on the heights that look over it all. It is the crumbling old neighborhood juke joint where music is played to be danced to, and the sweaty dancers dance to feel release, to feel free from all the city inflicts them with while giving them also what they want—or not.
