Coiled in the Heart Scott Elliott Hardcover $23.95 Read more...

INTRODUCTION

One hot afternoon in Haven, Tennessee seven year old Tobia Caldwell tells Ben Wilson to reach for a silver dollar in a place where Tobia had earlier seen a cottonmouth coiled in the twisted roots of an old oak. Tobia, whose family's ancestral manse sits up the hill from the creek, is the last in a line of proud, if declining, gentry. Ben Wilson has just moved into the first subdivision house to go up on property the Caldwells have sold away over the years to maintain financial solvency. Miraculously, when Ben reaches for the imagined silver dollar, the cottonmouth strikes, and the boy runs up the creek, falls, and dies.

This event colors every subsequent moment of Tobia Caldwell's life, try though he does to atone for it by throwing himself into a competitive search for glory in football, a successful attempt to find a new antivenin, and a family project whose goal is to buy back and erase all evidence of the subdivision houses that have surrounded "the Grand Old Caldwell Place." This search is deepened and complicated by the fact that several years after the creekside event, Tobia re-encounters and falls in love with Ben's twin sister, Merritt.

In sumptuous language that calls to mind the best of the southern literary cannon and introduces a talented new voice, Coiled in the Heart brings to vivid life a strikingly fresh contemporary myth, as it nods to a catalogue of other myths, living and dead. In doing so, it goes provocatively against the contemporary grain, positing a deconstructive conservation and doing nothing less than asking, as the novel's flawed hero does: What's the best way to live a life unburdened by guilt in twenty-first century America?

ABOUT SCOTT ELLIOTT

Scott Elliott was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1970 and grew up in Anchorage, Kentucky and on Washington State's Olympic Peninsula. He was educated at Vanderbilt University, The University of Colorado at Boulder, and Columbia University, where he earned an MFA. He is in the doctoral program in English Literature with a creative dissertation at the University of Houston, where he teaches and serves as a Writer-in-Residence for Writers in the Schools. He has taught at Hofstra University and for The Teachers and Writers Collaborative in New York. He lives in Houston with his Bonx, Grendel, a cat who is part Manx and part wild Tennessee bobcat.

Scott Elliott on Coiled in the Heart:

The Novel's Source
Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa describes writing a novel as "doing striptease in reverse." An initial, naked moment, a strong memory or image, calls out for attention and pushes the writer to the page. The writer, in an attempt to understand the image and its hold on him, slowly clothes the initial raw image so that by the time the novel is finished, the image is still there but hidden amidst an ordered collection of other narrative moments.

The idea for Coiled in the Heart came from a conversation I had with a friend about how valuable we thought it was—how lucky we had been—to grow up near living creeks—places where we enjoyed a measure of solitude and power (even as powerless children)—places where we could listen to trickling water and dream, skip stones, catch crawdads and small fish, look for arrowheads, walk on the surface and break up ice in the winter. This conversation, the impulse to get down the value my friend and I had defined, led me to write the beginning of what is now the second chapter of the novel, the chapter beginning, "It was my stream..." which was initially a short story.

Because every story needs a conflict, when I began to search for a source for the conflict, an image of the sort Llossa was talking about suggested itself to me. I had once seen some workers near a long-abandoned swimming pool where I grew up in Kentucky, sever the head of a copperhead. Even after the snake's head was cut off, its body twisted and the head kept striking. This remembered image was central to developing a conflict (the cottonmouth in Tobia's Eden) in the story in a mysterious way that I couldn't define then and can't now, even though it performed the important work of getting me to put and keep putting words on the page.

After the short story was finished, with Ben Wilson appearing to challenge Tobia and the resolution coming to pass and Tobia's familial relationships taking on greater complexity, I felt I had glimpsed a world I didn't want to leave. So, I started imagining where Tobia might be years from the event and how it would be interesting if he was obsessed with the event to the degree to which he would work to find an anitvenin. With that, the present tense sections of the book began. Shortly afterward, I started living my own life distractedly, the novel always on my mind, a growing host of characters, possibilities, and challenges clamoring for my attention.
 

Shape
The alternating past and present tense sections are meant to suggest a coiled serpent, head and tail rubbing against one another. As the novel's Robert Penn Warren epigram suggests—"Now uncoils like Then. Then like Now"—past and present moments in time, in a life, are in constant resonance with one another, and given the existence of a regrettable past action such as Tobia's involvement in Ben Wilson's death, the past can powerfully, perhaps unduly, shape and impinge upon present moments. One of the things the novel is interested in exploring is, as Michael Parker put it, "the past in the present and the crazy way it shapes the heart." In Tobia's case, everything he does after Ben Wilson's death is colored by what happened that hot day down by the creek. It is the epicenter of his life.
 

Praise

"The prose is exquisite."—Kirkus Reviews

"Richly atmospheric. Elliott shows promise as a solid, assured stylist."—Publishers Weekly

"Scott Elliott's Coiled in the Heart is far too wonderful and self-assured to be a first novel. He writes about nature with the same passion displayed by Henry David Thoreau. He writes about the south and its characters with the mordant cutting eye of Flannery O'Connor. Watch this guy."—Pat Conroy

"Here at last is a deliberately old-fashioned Southern novel—rich in family history and sense of place—that neither condescends to nor takes advantage of its subject. In the pages of Coiled in the Heart we find tattered Tennessee gentry; we find the haunting residue of tragedy; we find the new south inexorably squeezing out the old. Not only does Scott Elliot write gorgeous sentences one after the next, he understands these people and this place. Reminiscent of writers like William Styron, like Robert Penn Warren, while remaining wholly original, Coiled in the Heart marks the emergence of a very real and durable talent."—Michael Knight

"Coiled in the Heart is as rich an homage to the various histories that make up America that you could hope to find. This supremely talented writer has stitched together the myths of the ancient world with those of Gatsby or Faulkner or O'Connor, delivering to his reader a deeply satisfying and wholly original read for the 21st century. Is reparation possible, in the modern world? An ambitious debut novel asks no less of its flawed and affecting hero."—Antonya Nelson

"Scott Elliott is a strong new talent. His novel Coiled in the Heart is vital and vivid."—Elizabeth Spencer

"In Scott Elliott's fine new novel, place and character come together to create a thoroughly unforgettable story, one that will invade your dreams for many nights to come. Such richly textured writing calls to mind the works of Elizabeth Spencer, Peter Taylor and Robert Penn Warren. Yet Elliott's voice is his own, and with any luck it will speak to us many times in the years to come."—Steve Yarbrough

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Is Ben Wilson's death an event beyond culpability?
    
2. How does Coiled in the Heart respond to serpent lore, folklore, or myths from ancient and contemporary literature? What lores does this novel create?
    
3. How does guilt—personal and communal—make itself known within this novel? What messages does Coiled in the Heart offer about guilt in its many regards, and the possibilities for atonement?
    
4. Coiled in the Heart might be described as a self-consciously "southern" novel. In what ways does this self-consciousness manifest itself? What are some of its ancestors within a Southern or American literary tradition?
    
5. Many characters in Coiled in the Heart have obsessions—with another character, with history, with a natural event. How are these characters shaped by their obsessions?
    
6. What are the roles of financial success, technological innovation, agrarian traditions, and heroes in this novel's world? What is "progress" in Coiled in the Heart?
    
7. How does Tobia see himself within the traditions and history of the Caldwell family?
    
8. What is the nature of Tobia's relationships with his mother and father, and what is his role within their marriage? Has Tobia's father wooed his mother into a lasting reconciliation?
    
9. How do personal, community, political, and natural histories intertwine in the book?
    
10. What sort of happiness have the three childhood acquaintances, Tobia, Bradley, and Eon, sought as adults? What path has each taken—and what bargains has each made—to seek their vision of happiness?
     
11. What is the Reclamation Project reclaiming? What promises does the Reclamation Project hold for Tobia and his father?
     
12. How would you characterize Tobia's relationships with Merritt and Robin? Does he love both, one, or neither of them? What is Tobia's view of love?
     
13. How is the Dipsey-Doo club constructed, floor by floor?
     
14. What does Merritt know about Tobia's role in her brother's death at different points in the novel?
     
15. Will Tobia achieve the atonement he seeks? What sort of peace, if any, has he found or might he find with his personal and family history and his place in the world?
     
16. What is Tobia's relationship with each of the characters seated around the picnic table at the novel's end? Where will each of these relationships lead beyond the final words of the book?
     
17. If you imagine what will happen beyond the end of the novel, where do you see Tobia several months after the book's chronological scope?