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Going Under
Going Under is the haunting tale of a mother's journey to Bedlam, as she struggles with alcoholism and madness, and the ramifications for her children when she fails to make it back.
On the surface, the Tillotsons seem to be going handsome Don with his fast-track career, beautiful Jerri who could be a movie star, and their two children, Jeff and Meena. But Don's philandering and Jerri's drinking and mental instability tear the family apart. Jeff digs a tunnel in a lot behind their Oregon house with his neighborhood pals–an underground shelter from the turmoil above ground–never imagining it will become his mother's grave. Meena turns into a human spider, creeping about the house, spying on her dysfunctional family. Set in the 1960s and told from the children's and their Aunt Debbie's point of view, Going Under is a poignant and emotionally powerful tale about the darker side of the human spirit and the consequences for those least prepared to understand it.
"Luvaas tells a terrible but absorbing story and tells it movingly. I hope this book finds the wide readership it deserves." —Larry McMurtry, Pulitzer Prize winning Author of The Last Picture Show Lonesome Dove
"A mother drowning in alcohol drags her whole family down in William Luvaas's powerful novel." —New York Times Book Review
"A surreal and frightening air prevails as guilt, aggression and madness escalate in this powerful evocation of family members coming to grips with crimes against one another." —Publishers Weekly
"Going Under is told with power and authority as it explores a family's collapse into self-destruction and abuse. Luvaas's great power as a storyteller brings the reader up out of these sorrows and into a sense of redemption that is triumphant and true." —Frederick Busch, Author of Sometimes I Live in the Country and Long Way From Home
"Reading Going Under is like watching a train wreck happen before your eyes. It's horrify¬ing, powerful stuff you can't tear your eyes away from." —Susan L. Rife, Wichita Eagle
"I found Going Under to be powerful, moving, frequently funny, and ultimately positive. Luvaas portrays the members of a dysfunctional family with compassion and insight... Those who admired Wally Lamb's bestselling novel She's Come Undone will find Going Under to be a richer, deeper, and more insightful study of the psychological problems that can damage essentially good people." —Stephen Minot, Author of Three The Writing of Poetry, Fiction, and Dra¬ma and Surviving The Flood.
On the surface, the Tillotsons seem to be going handsome Don with his fast-track career, beautiful Jerri who could be a movie star, and their two children, Jeff and Meena. But Don's philandering and Jerri's drinking and mental instability tear the family apart. Jeff digs a tunnel in a lot behind their Oregon house with his neighborhood pals–an underground shelter from the turmoil above ground–never imagining it will become his mother's grave. Meena turns into a human spider, creeping about the house, spying on her dysfunctional family. Set in the 1960s and told from the children's and their Aunt Debbie's point of view, Going Under is a poignant and emotionally powerful tale about the darker side of the human spirit and the consequences for those least prepared to understand it.
"Luvaas tells a terrible but absorbing story and tells it movingly. I hope this book finds the wide readership it deserves." —Larry McMurtry, Pulitzer Prize winning Author of The Last Picture Show Lonesome Dove
"A mother drowning in alcohol drags her whole family down in William Luvaas's powerful novel." —New York Times Book Review
"A surreal and frightening air prevails as guilt, aggression and madness escalate in this powerful evocation of family members coming to grips with crimes against one another." —Publishers Weekly
"Going Under is told with power and authority as it explores a family's collapse into self-destruction and abuse. Luvaas's great power as a storyteller brings the reader up out of these sorrows and into a sense of redemption that is triumphant and true." —Frederick Busch, Author of Sometimes I Live in the Country and Long Way From Home
"Reading Going Under is like watching a train wreck happen before your eyes. It's horrify¬ing, powerful stuff you can't tear your eyes away from." —Susan L. Rife, Wichita Eagle
"I found Going Under to be powerful, moving, frequently funny, and ultimately positive. Luvaas portrays the members of a dysfunctional family with compassion and insight... Those who admired Wally Lamb's bestselling novel She's Come Undone will find Going Under to be a richer, deeper, and more insightful study of the psychological problems that can damage essentially good people." —Stephen Minot, Author of Three The Writing of Poetry, Fiction, and Dra¬ma and Surviving The Flood.
318 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 9, 1994
22 people want to read
About the author
William Luvaas
12 books5 followersWilliam Luvaas has published four novels, The Seductions of Natalie Bach (Little, Brown), Going Under (Putnam), Beneath The Coyote Hills, and the recently-released Welcome To Saint Angel, and two story collections: A Working Man’s Apocrypha and Ashes Rain Down: A Story Cycle–Huffington Post’s 2013 Book of the Year and a finalist for The Next Generation Indie Book Awards (Short Story)--and has edited an anthology of California writers: Into The Deep End. Luvaas has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, the Ludwig Vogelstein and Edward Albee foundations, and has won Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open Contest, The Ledge Magazine’s Fiction Competition, and Fiction Network’s 2nd National Fiction Competition. His screenplay for Welcome To Saint Angel was awarded Best Adapted Screenplay at the Golden State Film Festival (2018). His articles, essays and over 50 stories have appeared widely, including in American Fiction, Antioch Review, Blackbird, Cosmopolitan, Glimmer Train, Grain Magazine, North American Review, Short Story, The Sun, Texas Review, The Village Voice & The Washington Post Book World. Ten of his stories have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. Going Under was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and A Working Man’s Apocrypha was nominated for the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is is online fiction editor for Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts.
Luvaas’s novels and stories focus on people coping with adversity under difficult circumstances. An apocalyptic wind often blows through his work. Glimmer Train Co-editor, Linda Swanson-Davies, says of his characters: “He manages to make such swerving and impossible lives feel utterly true...even normal.”
Luvaas graduated cum laude from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a student activist. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University. He was the first VISTA Volunteer in Alabama, working for civil rights and economic justice. He has taught creative writing at San Diego State University, U.C.-Riverside, The Writer’s Voice in New York and The UCLA Writing Program. He has worked as a carpenter, pipe maker, window washer, freelance journalist, and Fiction Coordinator for New York State Poets in Public Service. Luvaas has lived in England, Israel, and Spain, and for a year in a primitive cabin he built in a giant stump in the Mendocino County redwoods. He now lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Lucinda, a painter and film maker.
Luvaas’s novels and stories focus on people coping with adversity under difficult circumstances. An apocalyptic wind often blows through his work. Glimmer Train Co-editor, Linda Swanson-Davies, says of his characters: “He manages to make such swerving and impossible lives feel utterly true...even normal.”
Luvaas graduated cum laude from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a student activist. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University. He was the first VISTA Volunteer in Alabama, working for civil rights and economic justice. He has taught creative writing at San Diego State University, U.C.-Riverside, The Writer’s Voice in New York and The UCLA Writing Program. He has worked as a carpenter, pipe maker, window washer, freelance journalist, and Fiction Coordinator for New York State Poets in Public Service. Luvaas has lived in England, Israel, and Spain, and for a year in a primitive cabin he built in a giant stump in the Mendocino County redwoods. He now lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Lucinda, a painter and film maker.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 2, 2012
I found Going Under to be very compelling storytelling. But what was particularly unforgettable and masterful was its understated directness. Yes, we are watching and are brought into the tragedy that Jeff and Meena are experiencing in watching their mother's increasing fragility, but we are also brought into the kind of very aware detachment that makes the children's survival possible. Mr. Luvaas captures this perfectly without either keeping us from caring or letting the reader drown in overwhelming emotion. There is loss, displacement, bewilderment, irony and instinct so keenly and beautifully rendered.
December 17, 2012
It's not often an image from a book stays with me years after I've read the final pages and closed the cover, but William Luvaas created such an image in "Going Under," a powerful and disturbing novel of a family nearly collapsed by alcoholism, mental instability and betrayal. It takes a writer of great skill and great compassion to create a story of such emotional wreckage that still, in the end, leaves the reader with belief in the goodness of the human heart.
December 4, 2012
Going Under is one of those rare novels that completely arrests the reader with the eloquence of its prose, the compelling nature of the characters, and its remarkable story. This is not a pretty tale. It is a fascinating tale, told in nitty-gritty details of a woman's complex descent into madness as well as a terrifying tale of the effects that madness has on her children and everyone around her. I could not put this book down. Bill Luvaas is a master story-teller, whose images leave their poignant footprints on the reader's psyche and heart, who writes as convincingly from the point of view of a child as he does from that of an adult, whose prose is never predictable and engages the reader's imagination on many levels. I highly recommend this novel. I am an unabashed fan of Bill Luvaas's fiction, and, after reading this novel, I am sure you will be a fan, too.
November 26, 2012
I read this book several years ago. I believe that Bill Luvaas did an excellent job of describing a dysfunctional family. This is a story that you will remember long after you have finish reading it.
January 22, 2015
It was a little slow, but I liked it.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews