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Seductions of Natalie Bach
The Seductions of Natalie Bach documents a heady girl's coming of age at a heady time, and her wide-eyed discovery of the wondrous, remarkably confusing world around her. Natalie flees her family and upper-middle-class Jewish background to discover life on her own terms.
Still in high school, Natalie Bach wanders the streets of New York, visiting studios of hip artists, experimenting with sex and searching for her sexual identity. She flies on the city's energy, experiencing jubilant highs and grinding lows-in fights with her spiteful mother, sessions with her psychiatrist, one night stands, and a painful, unrequited love affair with playboy Claude. She attends The Art Students' League and takes her first steps toward becoming an artist. Natalie haunts the apartment of her friend and former teacher, Maxine, a steamy seductress whose intensity matches Natalie's. Charged with urgency and confusion, their friendship blossoms into a love affair, leaving Natalie confused about her sexual identity.
Natalie's journey of self-discovery takes her cross-country to live in the redwoods, to Israel, and back to New York again. She is both seduced and seductress, an impressionable girl who epitomizes the rebellious spirit of the sixties, defying convention to live life on her own terms. Narrated in the first person by Natalie and her friend Maxine.
Little, Brown nominated Seductions for The National Book Award and the Pen/Faulkner Award. Independent film producer George Paaswell optioned film rights for the book.
“The Seductions of Natalie Bach is one of the best works of fiction about that pregnant decade [the ‘60's], comparable to Marge Piercy’s Small Changes and Lisa Alther’s Kinflicks.
Luvaas recaptures the excitement of coming of age against a background of assassination, political activism, sexual experimentation, intellectual arrogance and generational conflict. He also creates in Natalie Bach, and her friend and mentor Maxine Pearlman, believable characters whose fate we care about.”
John Gabree, Newsday – “For The Beach Blanket”
“This is a tale of lost sexual innocence, female relationships and growing up. Perhaps the most striking thing about The Seductions of Natalie Bach is Luvaas’ writing style. He tumbles onto the page in an explosion of phrases and descriptions to produce a novel that is not only fun to read but also full of surprises.”
Joyce Demma Bertshy, The Arizona Daily Star
“The story relates the coming of age of Natalie Bach: New Yorker and child of the ‘60s, who, while traveling down all the dead-end alleyways of her generation, manages to save herself by a gutsy determination to remain her own person....a novel by turns warm, coy, sad and funny, always human and ultimately heroic.”
Doug Marx, BookMarx column - Willamette Week
“This is not a book to rush through, looking for the sexy parts. It’s too well-written for that. One needs to savor the small surprises in the language. And, besides, there are plenty of sexy parts as Natalie struggles through sexual uncertainties on her defiant, careening course toward womanhood.”
Eleanor Martin, Sunday Magazine – The Times Herald Record
“The novel has the feel of one written by a native of the city [New York], though Luvaas grew up in Oregon and now lives upstate. He describes its grittiness, its romance and despair, with a poetry that makes the novel satisfying and intelligent reading.”
Jonathan Ward, Prospect Press
Still in high school, Natalie Bach wanders the streets of New York, visiting studios of hip artists, experimenting with sex and searching for her sexual identity. She flies on the city's energy, experiencing jubilant highs and grinding lows-in fights with her spiteful mother, sessions with her psychiatrist, one night stands, and a painful, unrequited love affair with playboy Claude. She attends The Art Students' League and takes her first steps toward becoming an artist. Natalie haunts the apartment of her friend and former teacher, Maxine, a steamy seductress whose intensity matches Natalie's. Charged with urgency and confusion, their friendship blossoms into a love affair, leaving Natalie confused about her sexual identity.
Natalie's journey of self-discovery takes her cross-country to live in the redwoods, to Israel, and back to New York again. She is both seduced and seductress, an impressionable girl who epitomizes the rebellious spirit of the sixties, defying convention to live life on her own terms. Narrated in the first person by Natalie and her friend Maxine.
Little, Brown nominated Seductions for The National Book Award and the Pen/Faulkner Award. Independent film producer George Paaswell optioned film rights for the book.
“The Seductions of Natalie Bach is one of the best works of fiction about that pregnant decade [the ‘60's], comparable to Marge Piercy’s Small Changes and Lisa Alther’s Kinflicks.
Luvaas recaptures the excitement of coming of age against a background of assassination, political activism, sexual experimentation, intellectual arrogance and generational conflict. He also creates in Natalie Bach, and her friend and mentor Maxine Pearlman, believable characters whose fate we care about.”
John Gabree, Newsday – “For The Beach Blanket”
“This is a tale of lost sexual innocence, female relationships and growing up. Perhaps the most striking thing about The Seductions of Natalie Bach is Luvaas’ writing style. He tumbles onto the page in an explosion of phrases and descriptions to produce a novel that is not only fun to read but also full of surprises.”
Joyce Demma Bertshy, The Arizona Daily Star
“The story relates the coming of age of Natalie Bach: New Yorker and child of the ‘60s, who, while traveling down all the dead-end alleyways of her generation, manages to save herself by a gutsy determination to remain her own person....a novel by turns warm, coy, sad and funny, always human and ultimately heroic.”
Doug Marx, BookMarx column - Willamette Week
“This is not a book to rush through, looking for the sexy parts. It’s too well-written for that. One needs to savor the small surprises in the language. And, besides, there are plenty of sexy parts as Natalie struggles through sexual uncertainties on her defiant, careening course toward womanhood.”
Eleanor Martin, Sunday Magazine – The Times Herald Record
“The novel has the feel of one written by a native of the city [New York], though Luvaas grew up in Oregon and now lives upstate. He describes its grittiness, its romance and despair, with a poetry that makes the novel satisfying and intelligent reading.”
Jonathan Ward, Prospect Press
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
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
November 26, 2012
"The Seductions of Natalie Bach," is the best book of fiction written about the '60's. It captures the color, the expansiveness, as well as the unique characters and energy of the era. I've read the novel six times! it's that good. The first time I read the book I couldn't put it down. I had a number of friends who were angry with me because they stayed up all night reading and weren't able to get much sleep. Can you imagine that? Furthermore, I'm amazed that a male can write females so perceptively and with such depth of feeling . Natalie is irrepressible in her urges and desires. There are times when you want to throttle her and say, "Stop!" and other times you want to do just the opposite...say "Go, girl!" especially with the marvelous swelling epiphany at the end of the novel which I won't reveal here. This I've learned was William Luvaas's first novel. It is quite a grand and ambitious effort for a writer who we should take note of from now on and always.
March 26, 2007
This is an incredibly good example of self-indulgent and overly written prose (The book i mean, not the sentence so much - but then again...). Open the book to a page, ANY page, and you'll find sublimely grandiose lameness.
Apparently Mr. Luvaas has nominated himself for the National Book Award no less than twice and, after ten years, won an NEA grant for writing. For any aspiring writer this book is amusing and soul-crushing all at once and for the same reason; that it was published at all. Amazing indeed.
Apparently Mr. Luvaas has nominated himself for the National Book Award no less than twice and, after ten years, won an NEA grant for writing. For any aspiring writer this book is amusing and soul-crushing all at once and for the same reason; that it was published at all. Amazing indeed.
November 30, 2012
I was first introduced to William's writings with the collection of short stories, "A Working Man's Apocrypha and also saw an independent film of the same name (which I also Highly Recommend) and thereafter had to read everything he wrote. He is a brilliant, talented writer. His writing is down to earth, entertaining and thoughtful.
December 17, 2012
Who better to take us through the sixties than headstrong, rebellious, independent, sexually-awakened Natalie Bach? William Luvaas has created a character so alive and real and ultimately human, as are all the characters in this fine novel. The Seductions of Natalie Bach is a wonderfully-written book and a compelling read. But don't rush through; savor. Judy Reeves, A Writer's Book of Days
November 26, 2012
I read this books years ago, it was very moving. I highly recommend it.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews