The Lion's Den by Anthony Marra

Published digitally by Amazon on December 19, 2019

Amazon commissioned five stories for a series it calls Inheritance. The stories are unconnected to each other except by the broad theme of family secrets. In a departure from its usual format, Tzer Island will review one story in the Inheritance series each day this week.

“The Lion’s Den” is an exceptional story about the evolving relationship between a father and son, told from the son’s perspective as he recalls his father’s death. Michael’s only accomplishment in life has been to write a vengeful tell-all memoir of his father, commissioned by a rightwing publisher that resented the rehabilitation of his father’s reputation in the public eye. Michael’s father, a combination of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, leaked documents revealing the extent of government surveillance of American citizens. For that he was vilified as a traitor and then heralded as a hero (often by the same columnists) after the Bush administration fell into disfavor. After six years in prison, he was pardoned by Obama.

Michael’s family suffered financial ruin after his father’s arrest. Michael resented his father’s refusal to profit from his actions by selling the rights to his story to Oliver Stone. “Moral heroism in America usually has the longevity of celebrity marriage,” Michael explains, “yet my father’s caught fire and kept burning, in no small part because he refused to speak of it at all, declining every opportunity to explain himself.” Hence Michael’s decision to profit from his father’s life and help his family by writing the memoir.

The story’s focus is the day Michael takes his father to see the lions at the zoo and the following day, when Michael serves as an emergency replacement speaker at the ethics symposium hosted by the Catholic grammar school he attended. He is replacing a securities trader who has been arrested for fraud and less savory crimes, making the trader a poor choice to speak about ethics, although the school had always been more concerned with a speaker’s name recognition than good character. Unfortunately, it “couldn’t afford the speaking fees of those uncorrupted by power.”

Low-key humor permeates the story. The ethics symposium is one example. Here’s another: “My mother, the most devout Catholic among us, didn’t believe in divorce, which was problematic in that her husband didn’t seem to believe in marriage.” And the thought that “parents love empty gestures,” in this case a school honor code, because “It’s about feeling that your children are decent, honest, and virtuous, rather than doing the work to make it true.”

Anthony Marra packs a surprising amount of characterization into this relatively short story, including Michael’s observation that he and his father conduct their emotional lives through newspaper clippings and “torn-out articles. Our conversations followed similar patterns of recycled factoids.” Despite their difficulties, there is something touching about the relationship, about the father’s jovial lack of resentment concerning the memoir, about the mundane truths (the father’s fame, the shadow in which the son lives) that had become life-defining family secrets. Even more touching is the gesture — in this case, not an empty gesture — that Michael makes at the story’s end, creating a fleeting tribute to his father that only Michael will understand.

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