Christal Cooper
The Dissection of
William Luvaas’s Beneath The Coyote Hills:
“The Meditation of
Thomas Aristophanos”
I used to love coyotes and had no fear of them, slept out under the stars
in my hammock; they slinked past underneath it, paying me no heed. I knew their well-worn trails through the
grove, watched them move like desert ghosts at sunset. Sometimes at night, they stretched out at
verge of my compound like domesticated dogs, curious about the wild man living
among them, typing away at his laptop.
--Excerpt from Beneath the Coyote Hills, Page 157
Book Analysis by Chris
Rice Cooper:
William Luvaas introduces protagonist Thomas Aristophanos in his most
recent novel Beneath the Coyote Hills ( published by Spuyten Duyvil Press on
September 15, 2016).
http://www.spuytenduyvil.net
50ish
year old Thomas Aristophanos could be described in many ways: epileptic, philosopher, homeless, fiction
writer, deep thinker; delusional thinker; but, above all else, he is the
searcher, on a quest for meaning and
happiness. It is through this quest that
he questions if his life is based on choice or circumstance; belief or fact;
does God even exist; and if God exists is it God who creates us or we who
create God? Do writers create characters
or do characters create writers? And
does an individual’s belief or disbelieve in either of these elements determine
his/her fate – regardless of what the truth may be?
It’s not a question we can answer.
So we invent religion and psychology to explain why things happen the
way they do. We walk in circles, never
getting any closer to the truth.
Page 87
Thomas lives in a hut in an abandoned underground
olive grove outside the town of Hamlet in the Southern California desert near
the foothills of the San Jacinto Mountains.
The hut is furnished with kitchen utensils, carpeting, mattress,
recliner, windows from an abandoned housing development, and a roof of Spanish
tiles Tommy salvaged from foreclosed homes.
He survives off of trash, cast offs, food thrown away from nearby
restaurants and grocery stores; olives from his grove; rabbits and deer that he
hunts; illegally tapping into the farmwoman’s house three miles away; and Romex
electrical cable, which he’s tapped into the power grid giving him free
electric lights and heating, and most importantly, the ability to write on his
lap top, which he salvaged from a caretaker’s shack at the county dump.
Besides, I had more need of it
than he did. He would sell it, while I
use it to keep myself sane, pecking away at the keys:
Page 2
In his day-to-day living Tommy encounters
people from past and present, dead and living:
his father Hector; The Lizard
Man; his young lover Cleopatra; Woody, the business partner who betrayed him;
Crash, the Jesus freak; Felony Fred; Joey Junior; Whispering Jane; Troy; LSD
Don; the Saul/Paul individual George Henry/Simon Peter; and the two characters
from his novel he’s been writing for the past twenty years: billionaire businessman Voltair Cambridge
Hoffstatter and his novelist wife Liz.
“I tell myself
this can’t be who I think it is. Maybe
we all have multiple copies, like 3-D photocopies or something. Individualism is a myth. We are a dime a dozen.”
Page 101 last paragraph
Tommy also encounters many identities
within his own self – some that he needs to exorcise: disappointing son to a depressed mother;
demon possessed boy to a father who refuses to accept epilepsy as a valid
medical condition; the guilty one; the grief stricken one; amnesia sufferer; runaway
father and husband; PTSD sufferer; old lover; delusional thinker; dissatisfied
searcher; and a victim of manipulation by the people he created in his novel;
or did they create him?
Salvadore Dali
Beneath The Coyote Hills is a double pleasure to
read because of the two major epiphanies/climaxes that happen in the book: writer Tommy crossing paths with the two
characters of his novel VD and Liz; and the one event that changes Tommy’s
entire life.
Summary of Beneath the Coyote Hills:
Beneath the Coyote Hills is a meditation on
failure, success, and life in between.
“They say you never get more than
you can handle. So how do we explain suicide, then, or divorce, or crimes of
passion, or parents who murder their children, or fall to pieces after having
them? How do we explain people like me?”
So begins the story of Tommy Aristophanos, a
luckless man, homeless freegan, fiction writer, and epileptic, who lives alone
in an olive grove outside the town of Hamlet in the foothills of the San Jacinto
Mountains in the Southern California desert.
The abandoned olive grove where Tommy resides
Tommy survives on his wits and
society’s leavings, while the main character of his novel, Voltaire Cambridge
Hoffstatter (Volt), is successful in all he undertakes. Their lives
unexpectedly intertwine when Volt emerges from the pages of Tommy’s novel to
harass him.
Volt believes character is fate, while Tommy’s
many reversals and fickle spells teach him that we control far less than we
imagine. In the final showdown between the two, we are left wondering who is
the true Pygmalion–Tommy or Volt?
Pygmalion (/pɪɡˈmeɪliən/; Greek: Πυγμαλίων, gen.: Πυγμαλίωνος) is a legendary figure of Cyprus. Though Pygmalion is the
Greek version of the Phoenician royal name Pumayyaton,[notes 2] he is
most familiar from Ovid's narrative poem Metamorphoses, in which Pygmalion was a
sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved.
A master of timing and entertaining dialogue,
William Luvaas peoples Tommy’s world with characters that are as outrageous as
they are real: Tommy’s depressed mother who never gets out of bed; Crash, a
tattooed, motorcycle-riding Jesus freak; Berkeley Don, hairy, kurta-wearing
Buddha of the high desert; and changeling Lizard Man who haunts Tommy in his
spells, as he takes readers on an unforgettable ride into the illusory world of
success and failure and of reality itself. Where do we draw the line between
reality and fantasy? To what extent do we write our own destiny, to what extent
is it written for us?
Part
satire, part picaresque romp, part speculative adventure, Beneath The Coyote
Hills unfolds as a multi-layered allegory that will stay with readers long
after the last page.
Praise of Beneath The Coyote Hills:
“Beneath the Coyote
Hills has cost me a sleepless night that I can scarcely afford, and has
left me cold with awe at the unwavering skill and subtlety of the narrative.
The sheer scope of the author's imagination, and the almost impossibly delicate
poetic weight of his prose, has made the discovery of William Luvaas' writing
one of the genuine joys of my reading-year. He is a remarkable writer, comfortably
among the finest at work in America today, and this novel is a towering and
maybe career- defining achievement, art of the highest order.”
–Billy
O'Callaghan, Irish Book Award-winning author of The Things We Lose, The
Things We Leave Behind
“Luvaas weaves elements
of other genres into the narrative, such as slipstream and poetry and even the
sci-fi trope of a boy and his dog, revealing this work in the final analysis as
a complex bricolage, a marvelous literary stew which illustrates perfectly how
the artist ‘shapes the beautiful and the useful out of the dump heap of human
life.’”
–Clare MacQueen, Publisher of KYSO Flash and editor at Serving House
Journal
Author
Q&A by William Luvaas:
1. What was your inspiration for Beneath
the Coyote Hills?
No single event
catalyzed the book, rather a lifetime of thinking and observation. I have long
been troubled by our culture’s obsession with success and failure. With
Heraclitus, we Americans tend to believe that “a man’s character is his fate.”
If we succeed, it is wholly due to our own merits and efforts; if we fail it is
due to our faults. We underplay the influence of forces beyond our control:
sickness, tragedy, war, economic downturn, et.al. So those who fail—at career,
love, even good health—carry a burden of shame, just as the successful carry a
burden of pride. It frightens us to realize we haven’t half the control we hope
to have in our lives. In the novel, I contrast self-described “failure” Tommy
(who may not strike us as failed in the end) to his immensely successful alter
ego, V.C. Hoffstatter (who may not ultimately strike us as much of a role
model).
Heraclitus by Johannes Moreelse. The image depicts him as
"the weeping philosopher" wringing his hands over the world, and as
"the obscure" dressed in dark clothing—both traditional motifs
2. What do you hope readers will take
away from the book?
Ideally, I hope they
will think about the interplay of choice and chance in our lives and how we
have no choice but to cope with misfortune. Maybe even to consider that we
should be more generous with ourselves when we are struggling and with homeless
people we see sleeping on the street, who may be as much victims of ill circumstance,
lack of opportunity, mental or physical illness, as of poor choices they make
in their lives. “There but for the grace of God go I.” We all need some good
fortune in our lives, and some have more of it than others. I strive, in my
work, to be on the side of compassion.
As Faulkner asserts in his towering
Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “The writer’s duty is to...help men endure by
lifting the heart.” Beyond this, I hope my readers will enjoy what is at times
a wild and unpredictable ride, with no knowing where we will end up.
3. Why did you become a writer?
I was reading
Dostoevski’s The Brothers Karamazov as a sophomore in college, pulling
an all-nighter in the attic of the Theta Chi fraternity house at The University
of Oregon, which might have been a dusty garret in Saint Petersburg. I had a
World Literature final the next morning at 8:00, and I hadn’t started reading
the 985 page book until that afternoon. Not smart. I became so immersed in the
characters and story that time stopped; I was not in Oregon, I was in Russia
(though I ran down to the kitchen now and again for more coffee). That whole
long night seemed to pass in an hour. Towards the end of the book, tears ran
down my cheeks; I was moved and overwhelmed that a book could be so powerful. It
took me through all the troubles and questions of my own young life. When the
boys shouted “Hoorah for Karamazov” at the end, I shouted with them.
At that
moment, a tiny, quavering voice in me whispered, I want to be able to do
that. I want to be a writer. It would be years before that voice led me to
the desk.
4. Tommy Aristophanos struggles with
epilepsy and you have lived with epilepsy yourself. Did you intend to
communicate a specific message about this condition to readers?
This is my first novel
with an epileptic main character. It has taken me years to be able to
write about it. I wanted the reader to experience up close what it’s like to
grapple with the demons of epilepsy, as Tommy must. His ailment is a trope of
sorts, the ultimate existential joke in a culture that fetishizes control of
one’s destiny. The epileptic—whether Tommy, Van Gogh, or Dostoevski—is never
fully in control. At any instant, without warning, we can be seized and thrown
to the floor through no fault of our own. We can neither control our seizures,
nor predict their coming. Thus epilepsy seemed in earlier times to be divinely
inspired: the victim “seized” by a higher power, either divine or demonic, and
thrown to the ground or into the fire. So, in terms of the book’s major themes,
it made sense that Tommy be an epileptic. He comes to realize that it isn’t the
falling that matters—we are bound to fall— but rather the getting up again. I
suppose my message is that though we can never fully control our fate we can
decide how we cope with it. This is no new message in literature but one of its
most enduring themes.
Another element that is
informed by my experience as an epileptic is that we can’t always draw a firm
line between reality and illusion. Many epileptics experience a distortion of
reality in vivid auras before their seizures, wherein we may hear celestial
music or experience the sensation of stepping out of our bodies or macropsia
and micropsia, as Lewis Carroll did—the world seeming to shrink or magnify
around him—as does his Alice in Wonderland. Reality distorts before a fit and
remains distorted after. Thus, Tommy’s auras make it impossible for him to
distinguish between illusion and reality at times. Which of his experiences and
fellow characters are real, which figments of his spell visions? Is he
authoring Hoffstatter’s fate or is Hoffstatter’s wife authoring his or is
someone else writing their story? We never know.
Alice Grows Very Very Large!
5. Glimmer Train Co-editor, Linda
Swanson-Davies, says of your characters: "He manages to make such swerving
and impossible lives feel utterly true...even normal." Would you describe
that as a conscious choice in creating your characters?
I suppose I am attracted
to outsiders in both my work and my life: folks who don’t fit in, misfits who
live on the edge, not so much defying the mainstream as disinterested in it.
They want to make their own way in the world and live by their own rules. It’s
not easy being yourself in a world that insists you fit the norm, so there are
tensions and conflicts in such characters’ lives that I find compelling; they
often end up in compromised situations and must struggle just to get by, living
by their wits. Maybe it goes back to growing up in Oregon in the fifties and
sixties. My father was always calling people “oddballs” or “characters.” It
seemed to me everyone was an oddball: my aunts and uncles, parents’ friends,
even my father and mother. They might work as lawyers, doctors or preachers,
but deep down they were oddballs. That’s what I found most compelling about
them.
6. Aside from being a highly accomplished
writer, you’ve also worked as a carpenter, pipe maker, and window washer, and
for a year lived in a primitive shelter you built in a giant stump in the
Mendocino County redwoods. How have these experiences influenced your writing
career?
Tremendously. I wrote a
long (unpublished) novel about my experience living in the redwoods: The
Uranian Circus, my starter book, 1,200 pages long.
William Luvaas: “On the patio of our mini-villa in Denia,
Spain circa 1972, at work on my first novel, THE URANIAN CIRCUS, on a Hermes
portable typewriter, a tiny table propped up on split logs for a desk. Full of
enthusiasm, but didn’t have a clue about how to write a novel.”
Then wrote about my
experience of the Sixties counterculture in The Seductions of Natalie Bach.
Going Under is about growing up in a troubled family; my mother was an
alcoholic and my father lived in denial, and we kids spent much of our time
tiptoeing around them.
So, while my work is not literally autobiographical, I
have shared the road with my characters. I regularly borrow people and events
from “real life.” My stories are usually set in places where I’m living when I
write them: in snowbound upstate New York, or the sweltering California high
desert, or the rain-drenched Mendocino Coast. My story, “Carpentry,” retells an
incident from my own life pounding nails.
William Luvaas doing construction work.
“How I Died” recalls a nearly fatal
car accident my wife and I had on the New York State Thruway one snowy night. I
encourage my writing students to expose themselves to a wide variety of people,
places, and experiences.
William Luvaas at a reading.
Mark Twain instructs us to “Write what you know.” The
more you have seen and done, the more you have to write about.
They say you never get more than you can
handle. So how do we explain suicide, then, or divorce, or crimes of passion,
or parents who murder their children, or fall to pieces after having them? How
do we explain people like me?
Doubtless there are wage
earners among our Hamletites (how else could the stores stay open). Although I
hear the cash economy is obsolete anymore. These days, banks fund credit
vehicles which consumers use to buy products, the banks take their cut, then
securitize their risk and sell it to investors via hedge funds, which cleverly
bet against prosperity via credit default swaps or some such, and make a
killing in the next big crash, so they can start the cycle all over again. No
one really understands how it works. It’s Rube Goldberg economics, a
self-perpetuating prosperity machine. Those of us on the economic outskirts get
by on its leavings. One thing you can say about capitalism: it produces one
helluva lot of trash.
Rube Goldberg
Biography On William Luvaas:
Raised in Eugene,
Oregon, William Luvaas graduated cum laude from the University of California,
Berkeley, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University.
He was a student activist and first VISTA Volunteer in Alabama, working with
black sharecroppers and domestic workers for civil rights and economic justice.
The “William Luvaas Community Center” in rural Madison County was named in his
honor.
William Luvaas: “That’s me (the white kid) hanging out with
sharecropper friends in Tallasee, Alabama back in the day, working as a VISTA
Volunteer for civil rights and economic justice. The local sheriff warned me,
“Y’r on thin ice, boyah,” the KKK burned a cross down the road one night. I was
scared 24/7, buoyed by the courage of local folks who had lived with oppression
all their lives and were rising up against it.”
William Luvaas has
published two novels, The Seductions of Natalie Bach (Little, Brown
& Foreverland Press), Going Under (Putnam & Foreverland Press),
and two story collections, A Working Man’s Apocrypha (Univ. Okla. Press)
and most recently, Ashes Rain Down: A Story Cycle (Spuyten Duyvil),
which was a Huffington Post’s Book of the Year and a finalist for the Next
Generation Indie Book Awards
William Luvaas’s essays,
articles and short stories have appeared in many publications, including The
American Fiction Anthology, Antioch Review, Confrontation, Epiphany, Glimmer
Train, Grain Mag., North American Review, Short Story, Stand Mag., The Sun,
Texas Review, The Village Voice and The Washington Post Book World. He is the
recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Fiction and has taught creative writing at
San Diego State University, The Univ. of California, Riverside and The Writer’s
Voice in New York, and The UCLA Writing Program.
He has also worked as a
carpenter, pipe maker, window washer, and freelance journalist and traveled
widely and has lived in England, Israel, and Spain, and for a year in a
primitive shelter he built in a giant stump in the Mendocino County redwoods.
He now lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, Lucinda, a painter and
film maker.
