“WILLIAM LUVAAS is probably best known for his 2013 book Ashes Rain Down, a linked collection of stories depicting a mountain community trying to subsist in a near future in which climate change has wreaked its havoc and the world order has apparently collapsed.”
“Prior to this book, Luvaas had published two novels, The Seductions of Natalie Bach (1987) and Going Under (1994), as well as another collection of stories, A Working Man’s Apocrypha (2007).”
“The two novels are more or less works of conventional realism — although stylistically quite well executed — but in A Working Man’s Apocrypha several stories seemed to be moving away from strict realism (a couple anticipating the post-apocalyptic fables of Ashes Rain Down).”
“That book shares realism’s goal of evoking a specific place and the people who live there, but it does so through an imagined extension of current reality, one in which the laws of that reality don’t entirely apply.”
“Beneath the Coyote Hills could also be described as a departure from realism as practiced in most literary fiction, although in this case not via post-apocalyptic fantasy but by calling into question the reliability of the narrative it constructs.”
“This description comes close to approximating the structure of Tommy Aristophanos’s narrative and its effect on the reader. Tommy seems to inhabit a space where time has indeed shattered, a state of being in which the notion of temporal progress has become irrelevant; and the reader moves with him “back and forth from past to present” — although the resulting episodes do have a larger coherence, are more than “vagrant images” flashing before his brain’s “event horizon.””
“This disorienting effect is only magnified when we learn further that “Tommy Aristophanos” is the “model” for a character in a novel written by Volt Hofstetter’s wife. When Tommy and Lizbeth Hofstetter meet and discuss the implications of their respective authorship of one another, surely some apotheosis of metafictional legerdemain has been achieved.”
“Like his previous work, Beneath the Coyote Hills is a novel that seeks to be about something. Ashes Rain Down is about the catastrophic effects of climate change. Going Under is about the degradation of family life caused by alcoholism. Beneath the Coyote Hills goes into considerable detail about the subprime lending scam that led to the financial crisis of 2007–2008. And while it would be an oversimplification to say that any of these works are solely or primarily about such topical issues, to obscure these issues in a metafictional cloud would be a puzzling strategy indeed.”
“Another consistent feature of Luvaas’s fiction — one ultimately grounded in the underlying assumptions if not necessarily the traditional practices of realism — is the attention it pays to the influence of place, specifically the West Coast from southern Oregon (Luvaas’s native region) to southern California.”
“The depictions of climate-ravaged Sluggards Creek in Ashes Rain Down and of the southern California desert in Beneath the Coyote Hills is one of the most impressive achievements of these books. California seems to serve in William Luvaas’s imagination as the most appropriate setting for tales of extremity: the elemental, harsh qualities of the landscape reinforce the sense of stark clarity with which the characters must learn to view their circumstances.”
“The primary strength of Luvaas’s fiction is in the vigor and lucidity of the writing, and these qualities are evident in Beneath the Coyote Hills. If this novel ventures somewhat equivocally into postmodernist whimsy, it is nevertheless an admirable book well worth reading.”
“Daniel Green is a literary critic whose essays and reviews have appeared in variety of publications, both scholarly and general interest, in print and online.”