Sofa so good

It’s a good thing Lee Cataluna doesn’t sleep too much.

If she needed eight hours a night, we wouldn’t have her new, intriguingly nuanced first novel, "Three Years on Doreen’s Sofa," due to be released next month by Bamboo Ridge Press. Nor would we have her many popular screenplays or her hilarious Ka Palapala Po‘okela-winning collection, "Folks You Meet at Longs and Other Stories" (2005, Bamboo Ridge Press).

She is considered one of the islands’ finest local writers. Her strength is to take our foibles, eccentricities and peculiarities and peel them like an onion, revealing our culture to ourselves first with humor and then with subtle insight.

Cataluna, a Sunday columnist for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and former reporter for print and TV media, now divides her time between La Quinta, Calif., near Palm Springs, and Hawaii. She is in her second year of study in the demanding Master of Fine Arts creative writing program at the University of California’s Riverside-Fullerton campus. And she spent the summer teaching at the Island School on Kauai, where her parents live.

Cataluna, 44, said she writes in snatches while her husband and 5-year-old son are asleep. (She is married to Jim Kelly, a former isle journalist who is now managing editor of the Desert Sun in Palm Springs.)

It seems to work for her: She won the 2004 Elliott Cades Award for Literature and was accepted into the exclusive Bamboo Ridge writers group (you have to be voted in), which aided in the birth of the new book. In a cover blurb, playwright Ed Sakamoto calls her "one freakishly talented-crazy writer."

"Three Years on Doreen’s Sofa" is about a fresh-out-of-prison local boy named Bobby who crashes on his sister-cousin Doreen’s sofa while he tries to get his life together. Sort of.

The character appealed to Cataluna because he’s a storyteller, as she is. And flawed, as we all are.

He was born partly out of her work as a general assignment reporter. "Over the years, I had to write about various treatment programs, and they’d always trot out some model client as spokesmen," she recalled. "You’d listen to him and he’d be talking about how he’d changed his life and so on, and you’d be thinking, ‘This guy is totally lying. But he’s a gooood liar.’ I ended up wanting to hear the lies."

She’s not saying everyone in treatment is lying about life change; she’s saying the most glib members might not be the most truthful.

Bobby is "that archetypal guy." And one of the most charming things about him is that he believes his lies. He comes up with stories to explain his and others’ behavior, and he actually buys them, when anyone with a grain of sense, looking at it from the outside, would be saying, "No waaays, Bobby."

CATALUNA, as her biographical blurb on the book tells you, isn’t Bobby. But she relates to some of the things he is. "I have that self-destructive, delusional side that many people have," she said.

She also relates to Bobby’s sister-cousin Doreen (same father, different mothers, but the mothers were sisters, and both Bobby and Doreen were conceived in the back seat of a car at popular Maui make-out spot — on the same night).

Doreen, a hard-working single mom, is tough as only a really ticked-off tita can be. First thing she does when she picks up Bobby from jail is to make him ride in the back of the truck while her dog gets the front seat. As soon as they get home, before Bobby even gets a chance at the sofa, she lays down the rules. (Bobby pretty much breaks every one of them in the first week.)

"Doreen," said Cataluna, "is the way she is because she’s fighting her inner Bobby."

The book was meant to be comedy, said Cataluna in a phone interview. When early readers told her they found the book sad, she said, "It really surprised me." The sometimes ridiculous plot was born out the school of farcical writing, but, as books often do, it grew into something she hadn’t anticipated.

Bobby hasn’t had many breaks in his life, but he doesn’t make many for himself, either. He’s lazy, a liar and a thief. But he is also likeable, articulate (in pidgin English mode) and heart-tugging.

Cataluna worked for three years to craft Bobby. The first draft came quickly, she said, in just three months. The better part of three more years was spent struggling with subsequent drafts.

Cataluna was born on Maui and has lived there from time to time for years (her father, Office of Hawaiian Affairs trustee Donald Cataluna, worked for C. Brewer & Co. and was often transferred between islands). The book is set in 1990s Maui, a time when the island retained many of its particularities but was changing fast, she said.

The author’s recall of Valley Isle places and institutions is spot-on. Maui readers will chortle and sigh with nostalgia.

AND THEN there’s that sofa. It’s a sleeper that doesn’t open out anymore, with scratchy upholstery in ghastly plaid earth tones. "I see that sofa everywhere on the side of the road," she said. In fact, she took a picture of one she recently came across in somebody’s backyard in Idyllwild, Calif., as a prototype for the artist doing the book cover.

The sofa is the book’s third most important character. Bobby lugs the thing everywhere as it disintegrates. "It is," she said, "a place to wash up on, like a beach." It is also a place you have to abandon if you’re going to advance. Once, during a tough period in her own life, she spent several months vegetating on a similar piece of furniture in a cruddy apartment. "But there comes a time when you have to get off the sofa and do something."

She did. You have to read the book to find out whether Bobby ever does.