Going Under

by William Luvaas

Going Under chronicles the deterioration of a family ravaged by drink, abuse, and deceit.  Jeff and Meena (13 and 15) must cope with an unreliable, philandering father (Don) and an unstable, alcoholic mother (Jerri) who slowly deteriorates into psychosis. As Jerri Tillotson sinks in a morass of irrationality and despair, she threatens to drag her children down with her before the story reaches its harrowing climax.  Yet, within this domestic tragedy, there persists the puckish humor and rich fantasy life of childhood as the kids invent strategies for survival.  Meena turns into a human spider, creeping about the house and spying on her dysfunctional family, spinning webs to protect herself from her abusive half-brother, Olsen.  Jeff digs a tunnel behind the house with his neighborhood pals-an underground shelter from the turmoil above ground.  The story comes to an unexpected climax in this ragged hole in the ground. 
          The Tillotson children confront their dilemma with ingenuity, courage, and mutual devotion, and, in the end, they triumph.  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 them.


Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award



GOING UNDER PAINTS TRAGIC PICTURE
            "Start reading, and you are immediately taken into the hellish life of the Tillotson family....This is a family that to outward appearances in the early 1960s was handsome Don with his fast-track career, movie-star beautiful Jerri, boy-child Jeff and girl-child Meena living on a cul-de-sac in a quiet Oregon town.  As Jerri's younger sister Debbie
" Nobody ever saw a thing in those places.  You could do a strip-tease in the cul-de-sac, set up a guillotine, throttle the kids.  Nobody would be the wiser.  They huddled inside around TV football and miniature pool tables.  Minded  their own.  Didn't give a 'fing * *** what happened across the street.  Why should  they?  This is a democracy after  all."
            But behind the front door on Walnut Street is a tornado.  Don can't keep his mitts off Debbie, Jerri keeps booze stashed in everything from bleach bottles to mayonnaise jars, the better to drown her memories of being sexually abused by her father and brother.  Don's son from his first marriage, Olson, is a creepy adolescent with one hand on his crotch and the other on his half-sister.
            Luvaas has created here a terrible and tragic picture of the ways family dysfunctions appear in succeeding generations.  Jerri is hypervigilant in watching for signs of little Meena being abused, but seizes upon the wrong perpetrator.  Her towering rages chase Don out of the house and terrify the children, who develop classic defense mechanisms to cope.  Jeff literally runs underground, digging with his neighborhood friends a 20-foot-deep tunnel.  Meena turns herself into a watchful, silent spider, wrapping bits of contraband in layers of monofilament and crisscrossing her bedroom window with an elaborate web....
            Reading going under is like watching a train wreck happen before your eyes. It's horrifying, powerful stuff you can't tear your eyes away from."
            Susan L. Rife,  Wichita Eagle
 
"The story is a page-turner, as they say, and the characters convincingly depicted."
William Vollman, National Book Award winning author of Europe Central
 
"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."
Stephen Minot, author 

318 pages, Hardcover

First published November 9, 1994

About the author

William 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.

Reviews

[Karen Goodman · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Pam · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Rb · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Kathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a little slow, but I liked it.