CANR
WORK TITLE: The Horse
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.willyvlautin.com/
CITY: Portland
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: LRC 2009
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1968, in Reno, NV; married.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Musician, songwriter, and writer. Cofounder of band Richmond Fontaine, 1994; Pacific University, Forest Grove, OR, writing instructor. Has also worked for ten years for a trucking company.
AWARDS:Earned three Oregon Book Awards; Nevada Silver Pen Award, University of Nevada; Nevada Writers Hall of Fame inductee, 2016; Oregon Music Hall of Fame inductee.
WRITINGS
Author of lyrics for his band, Richmond Fontaine, including the release of several music albums. Contributor to periodicals, including Cold Drill, Chiron Review, Sun Dog Southeast Review, and Zembla; author of introduction to Dan Fante’s Short Dog: Cab Driver Stories from the L.A. Streets, 2021.
The Motel Life, Lean on Pete, and The Night Always Comes were adapted into short films.
SIDELIGHTS
The front person and founder of the alternative country music band Richmond Fontaine, Willy Vlautin has known many struggles in his life. His distinctly nonmainstream musical group has not gained a large following in the United States, though they have found better success in Europe and the United Kingdom and have released a number of music albums. Vlautin writes lyrics and sings for the band, and his music is known for being distinctly dark and “about the sort of blue-collar folk that corporate U.S. treats with contempt,” according to Brian Denny in an interview with the author for Morning Star Online. After gaining some financial stability, Vlautin yearns for a more stable life than can be offered by a band constantly on the road. “The camaraderie of being in a band is my favourite thing. Other than that, I was a shy guy, I just wanted to go home,” he admitted to Peter Murphy in an interview for the Laura Hird website. Taking his writing to a new level, he penned his first novel, The Motel Life. He went on to write several more and garnered several Oregon Book Awards, a Nevada Silver Pen Award, and was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame and the Oregon Music Hall of Fame.
The Motel Life and Northline
As unrelievedly depressing as many of his songs, The Motel Life is about two brothers who never seem to get a break. Their mother died when they were young, and their father abandoned them. Sticking together, they lead a vagabond life, escaping their miserable existence with the help of drugs and alcohol. One day, their world goes from bad to worse when they hit and kill a teenager with their car. Ditching the body, the brothers flee from the authorities, trying to escape from the inevitable. Calling the novel a “gritty debut” with spare prose reminiscent of the work of S.E. Hinton, a Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that Vlautin “transmits a quiet sense of resilience and hopefulness” despite the subject matter. Christine Perkins, writing in Library Journal, held a contrary opinion. Describing the prose as “meandering” and “choppy,” Perkins felt that the book is an “inconsistent effort.” Other critics were more positive, with Murphy asserting that The Motel Life is “the work of a careful and conscientious writer.”
Vlautin published his second novel, Northline, in 2008. Allison Johnson finds that she has fallen far from the straight line of a model life. A high school dropout with a swastika tattoo on her back, courtesy of her skinhead boyfriend, she flees to Reno, Nevada, to escape him and his abuse. After giving birth to their child, she quickly gives him up for adoption and attempts to set her life straight by waitressing an overnight shift at a roadside restaurant.
In an interview for Seattle Post-Intelligencer, John Marshall questioned Vlautin about his dark and sad writing style. Vlautin clarified its source, saying that “I write my best songs when I’m hung over. Writing songs comes naturally when I’m more fragile and hung over. But to write fiction I’ve got to go out running, stay out of trouble and not go out. I’ve always had a big edge on me. My nature is to be darker, really sensitive. I’ve never had a ton of confidence, with bad nerves, although not as dramatic as Allison.” In an interview for Nerve, Vlautin admitted that he wrote Allison’s “story to show how people that screw up or are weak or make really bad decisions can still bounce back. The only thing you can do if you have anxiety problems or confidence problems or have been dealt a rough hand is get up every morning and try to do a little bit better than you did the day before, with the belief that if you do that, someday you’ll conquer—at least partially—your darker side. I hope so anyway, for my own sake.”
Will Hodginson, reviewing Northline in the London Guardian, observed that the novel “succeeds on many levels: as a portrait of America’s dispossessed, a simple story of a young woman trying to find her way, and a study of how the weak get dragged down paths that are damaging for themselves and others.” Toby Clements, writing in the London Telegraph, said of the story that “the devil is not so much in the detail, as in the character and the mood and here Vlautin is really impressive.” Clements summarized that Vlautin’s “writing is resonant and economic and full of compassion, and although his message is slightly alarming—that unless the weak act, they will be the prey of the strong—he suggests that no act is too small to start the fight back.” New Zealand Listener contributor Simon Sweetman suggested that “the device of having Paul Newman visit Allison in her dreams, talking to her, allows some quirky humour to slide in between measured doses of pathos and subverted soap-opera.”
Alison Hallett, writing in the Portland Mercury, illuminated that “Vlautin’s writing style is perfectly suited to his material: Things happen the way they happen, slowly but inexorably, with the significance of any moment rarely evident until after the fact, or maybe never evident at all.” John Williams, reviewing the novel in the London Independent, noted that the basic premise of Allison’s journey was not unique but allowed that “what makes it exceptional is the vividness with which Vlautin colours her world and his skill in plotting her journey.” Booklist contributor Thomas Gaughan pointed out that the author “uses the same strikingly spare and simple prose in Northline that distinguised” his debut novel. A contributor to Publishers Weekly had a different take on the writing style, noting that it “reads like stage direction.” The same contributor appended that “the abbreviated chapters give the narrative a rushed, slapdash feel.” A contributor writing in Kirkus Reviews observed that “at first Allison is a rather unattractive character … but eventually her fragility and vulnerability make her more sympathetic.” The same contributor concluded that Northline is “spare and strangely moving.”
The Free
(open new)The Free follows three individuals living in Washington State. Severely injured Iraq War veteran Leroy Kervin lives in an alternate world while physically residing in a nursing home. Pauline Hawkins is a caregiver at Leroy’s nursing home and tries to help a heroin-addicted teen return to a straight path. Freddie McCall works the night shift at the nursing home but has another job during the day. Despite being overworked, he cannot afford to support his daughters, who live with their mother in Nevada.
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Marisa Silver admitted that, “for the most part, Vlautin’s unadorned narrative is affecting; these unassuming characters bore into us in surprising ways…. At times, however, Vlautin’s refusal to let the characters react with anything but plain-spoken equanimity begins to feel like idealism, and it has the effect of flattening the narrative.” In a review in the New Statesman, Phil Klay recorded that “Vlautin’s characters are, at heart, good people trying to navigate the world in extremely trying circumstances. Their outlook comes not from avoiding unpleasant realities but from confronting them and making the best moral choices possible. The book achieves a kind of beauty–not in spite of the harsh subject matter, but because of the intelligence and moral purpose with which Vlautin approaches it.”
Don't Skip Out on Me
In Don’t Skip Out on Me, the Reeses have served as adoptive caretakers to Horace Hopper for two decades after his parents abandoned him. They hope Horace will take over the Nevada sheep farm. However, Horace follows advice from a self-help book to forge his own path to become a Mexican-style boxer. He travels around the region trying to fulfill his dreams before landing in Las Vegas.
Reviewing the novel in New Statesman, Ben Myers remarked that “Vlautin’s characters are the walking wounded yet manage to carry themselves with dignity, and only a reader with a heart of anthracite could be unmoved by their situations. They continue to live on long after Don’t Skip Out on Me has ended in devastating style.” Writing in Times Literary Supplement, Daniel Clarke commented that “Vlautin’s lyrics carry some of the restrained, oblique quality of a Carver short story, but stretched to novel length, his tale’s moral universe is too simple to bear comparison with the great flag-bearer of ‘dirty realism.’” Clarke concluded that the novel “reads like the work of an American Ken Loach, if that’s not too far from the open road.” Booklist contributor Bill Ott mentioned that the author disarms readers “with close-to-the bone prose that leaves us utterly exposed to the tragedy of being alive–and every bit as thankful for those moments of aching humanity before the curtain falls.”
The Night Always Comes
With The Night Always Comes, thirty-year-old Lynette wants to buy a Portland, Oregon-based rental home that she shares with her family. She finds her mother financially irresponsible and her brother incapable of managing property. Although she doesn’t have the money to buy it, she decides to collect from those who owe her money. Lynette dives into an unsavory world of working-class people who are struggling to get by and attempts to extract what she feels she is owed to accomplish her goal of owning property and getting a loan from the bank.
In a review in Times Literary Supplement, George Berridge reasoned that “Vlautin is a fine writer, his books engaged and resonant, but he is not without his faults.” Berridge suggested that “the quick, episodic format of Vlautin’s books at times makes them feel harried, their events far-fetched.” Berridge also noted that “Vlautin’s compassion for his subjects sometimes makes him stray off course, as characters veer into expository monologues or didactic little parables that all too bluntly advance the author’s own well-intentioned politics.”
A Kirkus Reviews contributor acknowledged that “Vlautin has written a soulful thriller for the age of soulless gentrification.” The same contributor said that this “working-class drama finds the grit beneath Portland’s gentrification.” Booklist contributor Bill Ott observed that “Vlautin never lets us forget that hovering over Lynette’s Hail Mary pass at salvation is the specter of gentrification.” Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Alanna Bennett remarked that The Night Always Comes “stalls out during its many long monologues spelling out exactly what each character is thinking in clunky detail. Vlautin’s etchings of the city’s poor, white population are at times overwrought.” Bennett conceded that it “regains its footing, though, in the moments where we get to live in Lynette’s inner world.”
The Horse
In The Horse, sixty-something former musician Al Ward finds an old horse that has wandered onto the abandoned Nevada mining camp where he lives. He sees the horse is bleeding after being attacked by a coyote and believes he should put it down. He realizes, though, that he and the horse are in the same predicament and decides to try and help the horse get better.
Writing in the London Observer, Killian Fox lauded that the novel is “tremendously compelling. Vlautin’s characters are briskly sketched … but the dialogue is sturdy and the milieu in which Ward’s career unfolds … is richly conjured. Few fans will resent Vlautin for picking over this terrain once more. The Horse is as succinct and wrenching as a well-honed folk song.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor noticed that “Vlautin understands the ups and downs of a touring musician’s life, and his experiences inform Al’s long career.” The same critic summarized that “anyone who’s hit rock bottom can still get a shot at redemption if they’re willing to do what it takes.”(close new)
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 1, 2008, Thomas Gaughan, review of Northline, p. 26; February 15, 2014, Bill Ott, review of The Free, p. 24; December 1, 2017, Bill Ott, review of Don’t Skip Out on Me, p. 25; February 15, 2021, Bill Ott, review of The Night Always Comes, p. 25.
Bookseller, November 17, 2006, “Vlautin Signs Up for Two More Books with Faber,” p. 13.
Comes with a Smile, September 22, 2002, Stav Sherez, author interview.
Entertainment Weekly, June 1, 2007, Clark Collis, “Richmond Fontaine,” p. 68.
Guardian (London, England), March 8, 2008, Will Hodginson, review of Northline.
Independent (London, England), February 22, 2008, John Williams, review of Northline.
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2008, review of Northline; November 15, 2013, review of The Free; February 1, 2021, review of The Night Always Comes; June 15, 2024, review of The Horse.
Library Journal, May 15, 2007, Christine Perkins, review of The Motel Life, p. 85.
Nevada, November 1, 2008, Caleb Cage, author interview.
New Statesman, March 14, 2014, Phil Klay, review of The Free, p. 54; March 16, 2018, Ben Myers, review of Don’t Skip Out on Me, p. 47.
New York Times Book Review, June 24, 2007, John Wray, review of The Motel Life, p. 22; March 23, 2014, Marisa Silver, review of The Free, p. 21L; April 25, 2021, Alanna Bennett, review of The Night Always Comes, p. 16L.
New Zealand Listener, May 10, 2008, Simon Sweetman, review of Northline.
Observer (London, England), May 21, 2024, Killian Fox, review of The Horse.
Oregonian (Portland, OR), April 22, 2007, Jeff Baker, “His Sad Stories Didn’t Sell, Nor Did His Music. Willy Vlautin Persevered.”
Portland Mercury (Portland, OR), May 1, 2008, Alison Hallett, review of Northline.
Publishers Weekly, February 26, 2007, review of The Motel Life, p. 53; February 11, 2008, review of Northline, p. 49.
Seattle Post- Intelligencer, May 5, 2008, John Marshall, author interview.
Spectator, February 3, 2018, John R. MacArthur, review of Don’t Skip Out on Me, p. 33.
Telegraph (London, England), February 22, 2008, Toby Clements, review of Northline.
Times Literary Supplement, June 4, 2021, George Berridge, review of The Night Always Comes, p. 17; March 9, 2018, Daniel Clarke, review of Don’t Skip Out on Me, p. 25.
ONLINE
Americana UK, http://www.americana-uk.com/ (October 27, 2007), author profile.
Austinist, http://austinist.com/ (September 19, 2007), author interview.
Bookmunch, https://bookmunch.wordpress.com/ (May 2, 2024), author interview.
Captain Obvious, http://www.thankscaptainobvious.net/ (July 31, 2008), author interview.
Cheezeball.net, http://www.cheezeball.net/ (February 16, 2009), author interview.
Famous Writing Routines, https://famouswritingroutines.com/ (March 13, 2023), author interview.
In Music We Trust, http://www.inmusicwetrust.com/ (February 16, 2009), Alex Steininger, author interview.
KQED Web site, http://www.kqed.org/ (May 1, 2007), review of The Motel Life.
Laura Hird Web site, http://www.laurahird.com/ (October 27, 2007), Peter Murphy, author interview.
Morning Star Online, http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/ (November 10, 2004), Brian Denny, author interview.
Nerve, http://www.nerve.com/ (February 16, 2009), author interview.
NW Book Lovers, https://nwbooklovers.org/ (February 4, 2014), Brian Juenemann, author interview.
Powells website, http://www.powells.com/ (February 16, 2009), author interview; Kate Bernheimer, author interview; (April 6, 2021), “Powell’s Q&A: Willy Vlautin.”
Puremusic, http://www.puremusic.com/ (February 16, 2009), author interview.
SF Weekly Online, http://www.sfweekly.com/ (June 27, 2007), Jennifer Maerz, “Manifesting Dead-End Destinies Willy Vlautin Attempts the Great Escape.”
Uncut, http://www.uncut.co.uk/ (October 27, 2007), Allan Jones, author interview.
Willy Vlautin website, http://www.willyvlautin.com (August 10, 2024).
Born and raised in Reno, Nevada, Willy Vlautin is the author of seven novels and is the founder of the bands Richmond Fontaine and The Delines. Vlautin started writing stories and songs at the age of eleven after receiving his first guitar. Inspired by songwriters and novelists Paul Kelly, Willie Nelson, Tom Waits, William Kennedy, Raymond Carver, and John Steinbeck, Vlautin works diligently to tell working class stories in his novels and songs.
Vlautin has been the recipient of three Oregon Book Awards, The Nevada Silver Pen Award, and was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame and the Oregon Music Hall of Fame. He was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and was shortlisted for the Impac Award (International Dublin Literary Award). Three of his novels, The Motel Life, Lean on Pete, and The Night Always Comes have been adapted as films. His novels have been translated into eleven languages. Vlautin teaches at Pacific University’s MFA in Writing program.
Vlautin lives near Portland, Oregon with his wife, dog, cats, and horses.
“Willy Vlautin is one of the bravest novelists writing. Murderers, cheats, sadists, showy examples of the banality of evil, are easy, but it takes real courage to write a novel about ordinary good people. They don’t fit into the cynic’s little boxes — they’re way too big. The guy working two eight-hour jobs who still can’t meet the mortgage but won’t let his kids down, the hospital night nurse coping with her crazy mean father and trying to rescue a lost girl — common people, the ones who never get the breaks, the ones who need, and know, compassion. An unsentimental Steinbeck, a heartbroken Haruf, Willy Vlautin tells us who really lives now in our America, our city in ruins.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
“No one anywhere writes as beautifully about people whose stories stay close to the dirt. Willy Vlautin is a secular-and thus real and profoundly useful—saint.”
Lidia Yuknavitch
Going to the Well with Willy Vlautin
AN INTERVIEW BY BRIAN JUENEMANN
February 4, 2014
VlautinRedFlannel
Willy Vlautin is an author and songwriter from Scappoose, Oregon, just up Hwy 30 from the St. John’s Bridge. He’s revered enough to have been recruited to read the works of William Stafford and Ken Kesey in documentaries of their lives and work recently aired on Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Still, there are a lot of readers out there, Northwest included, who have yet to read any his big-hearted, blue collar tales. His fourth novel, The Free, could be the book to change that. And chances are, once you’ve read one Willy Vlautin, you’re going to want to make some room toward the tail end of your alphabetized bookshelf.
Vlautin was gracious enough to come home at the end of a couple of long days in the music studio and answer some questions waiting in his inbox, when he probably needed to be doing some laundry in preparation for a European kickoff to his book tour.
Hard working, diligent, courteous—from the writer to the page.
BJ: You are on a pretty good creative roll upon the release of The Free. In 2011 you won an Oregon Book Award for your novel Lean on Pete. This past October, your band, Richmond Fontaine, was inducted into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame. In November, the film based on your first novel, The Motel Life, was released. I know I’m setting you up here, but how do your rank these experiences?
WV: Any time I get recognized or acknowledged or helped out it means that maybe I can keep going with what I’m doing. That’s the way I’ve always felt. It takes a bit of heat off, a bit of the worry, and gives me confidence and energy to keep working on the books and the band. As far as ranking… Well anytime the band gets recognized it is the best as there’s four of us working at it and they’re my pals. But for Lean on Pete to be recognized both with the Oregon Book Award and then short listed for the IMPAC was pretty great. Charley Thompson, the narrator of L on P, has always meant a lot to me. I like that kid quite a bit. The movie, hell that was just fun and weird with no pressure or worry.
BJ: You mention the IMPAC, the Dublin Literary Award, which is where you are headed first on The Free tour. You’ll be interviewed by Roddy Doyle, who has to be a music lover as writer of The Commitments and the brand new follow-up, The Guts. Have you met him on previous book or band tours? Have you been brushing up on some Irish English slang to fire back at him?
WomanWhoWalkedWV: My grandmother gave me Roddy Doyle’s first book, The Commitments when I was twenty or so and I loved it and have bought his books ever since. He’s one of the best working class writers we have. The Woman Who Walked Into Doors and the sequel, Paula Spencer, have been huge inspirations to me. So getting to do events with him is amazing ‘cause I am such a fan and also because he’s a great guy. Humble and funny and down to earth. I met him first in Galway. I did an event with him at a fancy hotel in a ballroom with crystal chandeliers and I was nervous as hell but it turned out great because he was so damn nice. But hell he’s worlds more witty than me so I just try to keep my mouth shut and listen hoping I might learn something.
BJ: You are currently in the studio to knock out some new material before turning your focus on to promoting The Free over the next couple to many months. How do you compare the creative processes, making a book and making music?
WV: Making records is a collective effort so you get to sit back and listen to other people and trust other people’s instincts and ideas. I like that aspect quite a bit. But making a record usually has a limited window due to time and money constraints, while editing a novel is all about perseverance and hard work. It’s cheap and the only one you have to hire is yourself, and I work for less than nothing! You can edit for years if you want to and for me that’s the best part and the part I enjoy the most. I could tinker on a story for years, and I did do that on The Free. I wrote the first draft in six months and spent three years editing it pretty much non-stop.
BJ: And the touring? By the time this interview posts you’ll have already done a European lead jaunt and begun an extremely ambitious U.S. book tour. What’s it like touring as an author, solo every night, in comparison to traveling and performing with the band?
WV: Touring with the band wins that one. I don’t have to drive so I just sit in the back and read novels. I start each tour with a stack of books and just plow through them. I dig it. I don’t worry about anything except for trying not to be the weak link in the band and then the payoff is getting to play gigs. Book touring’s harder as I’m usually just reading from a book under fluorescent lights. There’s not a bar or dim lights and I’m all by myself. I drive by myself and hell, I get tired of my company. But I do get to listen to audiobooks all day while driving. I’m addicted to audiobooks and that and being in bookstores make up for the downside of book touring.
BJ: Can you give us a favorite recent or all-time audio book? How about favorite reader—there are some sought after voices that do a lot of work in that venue, aren’t there?
WV: I love anything read by Will Patton. He reads a lot of Denis Johnson’s stuff, Train Dreams, Jesus’ Son, Tree of Smoke. Those are amazing. Also his reading of James Lee Burke’s novel are unreal. The guy is just flat out the best. I also just listened to Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. The story of Louis Zamperini. Just amazing. I listen to Ironweed by William Kennedy (read by Jason Robards) at least once a year. I read and then listened to The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers. Both were amazing and the book changed a bit when I heard it. That guy can really write. Oh and don’t forget anything read by George Guidall. A great reader can elevate the book, put a twist into it, a heart that you might not find on your own. Plus you can hear rhythms in the writing that you might not pick up just reading it. I learned a lot about the way William Kennedy writes from listening to the rhythm Jason Robards took from the prose.
TheFreeBJ: Just about the time I started reading The Free, I was sent a link to the essay “Tale of the Seed and the Song” from the New York Times Opinionator blog. It’s from Eric Earley, of the Portland-via-Salem band Blitzen Trapper (eventually destined for their own enshrinement in the OMHOF). He says, “Ever since I was old enough to pick up a banjo I’ve been searching out these seeds, where every song starts. Something small and out of the way. These seeds can be tragic or crazy or terribly mundane but they are necessary to find your way in a world full of nonsense…. Any writer sees these seeds for what they are, holds them in and houses them indefinitely.”
It felt very apropos to get this while reading a Willy Vlautin novel, and I want to ask you about your “seeds.” Obviously every writer has to come up with ideas that strike a chord, but your details always seem unquestionably sincere. Snapshots of the real. Maybe you tell us about one or two from The Free? Freddie’s ’65 Mercury Comet, Pat’s daily frozen dinner and a liter of soda, Amalia Rodrigues—these things are revisited, touchstones to seeing and understanding your characters, never insignificant.
WV: The Comet came from the idea that Freddie’s the sort of guy who hangs on to the things he knows. He keeps the car as it was his first car. He’s sentimental. When it breaks, and it’s old and does break, he just thinks about fixing65Comet it, not getting a new car. He tends to think within the framework of his situation. He doesn’t look outside of it, and that as well as fear leaves him with the job he has at the failing paint store with a boss who’s greed and lack of ambition are running the place into the ground. Sadly Freddie tries to save the place instead of looking for a different job so he’s being run into the ground and mistreated as well.
His boss, Pat, is based on a boss I had. The man ate frozen dinners every day for lunch and he would make you leave the building from noon to one so he could listen to “Focus on the Family,” a religious program hosted by Dr. James Dobson. He’d eat while on speaker phone with his wife. No business calls were answered and no one was allowed into the building during this time. The thing that stuck with me about him was that he was the most un-empathetic yet the most religious man I’d ever met. He wore his religion with boxing gloves wanting to pound anyone that wasn’t a believer. Yet for all the scripture he read and programs he listened to he forgot the basic ideas: to be kind and humble and decent and put others before yourself.
And Amalia Rodrigues, she’s the tremendous Fado singer. I’ve always admired her greatly, hell she’s Amalia Rodrigues! More than anything I brought her into the book because I wanted her to look after Leroy, the injured soldier, and his girlfriend, Jeanette. I wanted Amalia Rodrigues to be their good luck charm, to be their beauty and safety while they made their way inside Leroy’s troubled and scarred up mind.
BJ: One sentiment that is regularly broadcast by readers and reviewers of your work is your ability to convey hope and the best of humanity even in very difficult and often tragic circumstances. But that glimmer has to be set against some pretty serious darkness to shine so brightly. In The Free, you give readers a dose of the pitch black stuff that’s generated from the worst of our weaknesses and fears. Where would you say your spirit generally lives on the spectrum? Is it easy for you to be hopeful or kind of a regular tribulation, as we experience in your stories?
PeteWV: I do write a lot about people in the middle of their life’s struggle, their Achilles heel, because often I’m feeling that way myself. I like to be around people and characters that don’t give up, who fight. Honestly this is probably just because I’m scared of giving up myself. They give me courage. A guy like Charley Thompson, from Lean on Pete, saved my life for a couple years. He got me out of bed each day ‘cause the kid was tough and even though he’d get beat up and dragged down, he’d still get to his feet and keep going. At the time I needed to be around that. I needed to remember that side of myself. So in the end Charley Thompson was a great pal to me. Pauline and Darla and Freddie, from The Free, are the same. Yet in The Free it’s the strong people like Pauline, Darla, and Freddie, who try to save the people that aren’t quite strong enough to make it on their own. I wrote them to remind myself to be good to the people close to me, and to remember that even when you’re down and out you have to be kind, you have to remember to try and be decent and keep your humanity.
MotelLife-MovieBJ: Okay, after laying it to your pretty heavy, we’ll wrap things up with a couple of easy ones: Did you participate in or at least visit any of the production of “The Motel Life” film—and, what I’m really getting at here is, did you get to meet Kris Kristofferson?
WV: I didn’t have much to do with “The Motel Life.” I took the directors around Reno and showed them the places in the book but I didn’t write the screenplay or have any real involvement. They were pretty damn nice to me though. They even brought me down to meet Kris Kristofferson. I lasted a couple minutes before I was too nervous and hadHalfwayClub to leave. Sometimes it’s too much to meet your heroes. The best of it was that he shot a scene in a restaurant I’ve been going to since I was a kid. It’s a great place called the Halfway Club and he even sat in the same booth I always sit in. It was very surreal and amazing. I think the movie came out good, especially the animation which was done by a brilliant guy named Mike Smith.
NorthlineBJ: And the soundtrack isn’t bad either, with a Richmond Fontaine track folded in there with the likes of Townes van Zandt, Marty Stuart and Bob Dylan! Did you work that into the fine print or did the filmmakers ask you for a song?
WV: Ha I wish I was that savvy. No the directors put the RF song “Boyfriends” in there on their own. We were honored and super surprised they did, and they did it at the end credits and played the whole song, hell we were even next to Bob Dylan. And you’re right it is a good soundtrack. At one time it was even a better soundtrack as they had tons of Willie Nelson songs in the movie but I think his songs are too expensive and they couldn’t swing it. Willie Nelson is the patron saint of The Flannigan Brothers (from The Motel Life) so it would have been great. But at least they talked about him in the movie!
BJ: Rainier Artesians or Hamms Beer Bear?Artesians
WV: Ha, I’m a Rainer man all the way. That’s why I gave Leroy and his girl, Jeanette (from The Free) Rainier beer whenever they needed it.
BJ: When’s the last time you caved in for Bing’s takeout?
WV: Man, I haven’t been in Bing’s for anything but a gin and tonic in a few years. It’s the hard thing about living in a small town. You have to drive 50 miles to get good Chinese food.
The Free is available in paperback and in an audio version narrated by none other than, Willy Vlautin. Vlautin begins a seven-week U.S. tour in support of The Free starting tonight at Powell’s. Catch him in your neck of the woods.
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Q&AS
Powell's Q&A: Willy Vlautin, Author of 'The Night Always Comes'
by Willy Vlautin, April 6, 2021 8:50 AM
The Night Always Comes
Photo credit: Dan Eccles
Describe your latest book.
I was thinking of a quote by our last president: "The point is you can’t be too greedy." He was talking about business, but I do feel this idea has long leaked into American politics and into society itself. That led me to thinking about Portland. I used to drive downtown and stop and count cranes. Cranes meaning new buildings going up and there were often 10-15 of them at the same time. An explosion of growth. Portland as a boomtown. I’ve rented an office in St. Johns for 13 years. In the last five years, four large apartment buildings have been built within two blocks of my office. Housing prices in the area have gone through the roof, as have rental prices. Old, beat-up houses are going for $300,000-$400,000. At the same time tent encampments are appearing. People living permanently in tents. I can see them from my office too.
I began thinking about all of that in terms of a struggling working-class family who have rented their North Portland house for 30 years and now the owner wants to cash out and sell. Can they survive gentrification and buy it? Can they navigate such rapid change? The Night Always Comes came from the idea of getting left behind. I wanted it to be fast and intense because the growth is fast and intense. The change is happening jaw-droppingly fast. The main protagonist, Lynette, spends two days and two nights trying to convince her mother to buy their rental. We follow Lynette as she tries navigate the opportunism around her. Will she disappear and get swallowed by her past and the oncoming gentrification, or will she survive and get to stay in her neighborhood and in her house with her family?
What was your favorite book as a child?
My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. I must have read it a dozen times. I didn’t have the guts the kid had, but I sure wanted to be him.
When did you know you were a writer?
I don’t know if I’ve ever thought I was. I have just always liked disappearing into stories. As a kid, part of me lived in Cannery Row with Mac and the boys or in Springsteen’s early records. I used to disappear inside them for days on end. But eventually those worlds would give out, so I created my own. Both in stories and in writing songs. It’s just a bad habit of mine that I’ve never been able to quit.
What does your writing workspace look like?
I have a small office in St. Johns with just a desk and a couch. I have photos of Myrna Loy, Carole Lombard, and Gail Russell on the walls. I stare at them all day long. I also have a poster of the Pogues that I’ve had for 35 years, a shoe from my horse Jasper, a photo of Barry Gifford on horseback, and a photo of the boxer Ernie “Indian Red” Lopez, who helped inspire my novel Don't Skip Out on Me. The office has three windows. Two look out over a bar called Slims and the other an old movie theater. It’s the greatest place ever.
The great Myrna Loy stares at me all day long.
What do you care about more than most people around you?
Probably the genius of fiddle player Kevin Burke, the stories of Barry Gifford, and the voice of Candi Staton.
The legendary Kevin Burke.
Tell us something you're embarrassed to admit.
I can’t go a day without listening to an audiobook. I’m obsessed with them and have been for years.
Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good book with which to start.
If I could hand out a book to every person I know it would be Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women. I feel so lucky that I’ve found her work. She’s so beat-up and heartbreaking yet at peace with the situations she finds herself in. I wish I would have found her work earlier, but I’m so grateful to have found it at all.
Besides your personal library, do you have any beloved collections?
I collect spaghetti western albums. I was so obsessed with them that for a long time I couldn’t listen to anything else. For years I’m talking. I drove my wife nuts; even my dog started to hate me.
A great series of LPs focusing on spaghetti western songs.
What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
Sadly, I’ve never had an interesting job and I try to block out every job I’ve had because they were all manual labor and not a lot of laughs. But I was a house painter for years and did almost paint a wild sex fiend’s house. He had secret shower rooms and a silver room with only a bed and pulleys and wall hooks to tie people up. He had a bedroom full of mirrors, a bathroom full of mirrors (even the ceiling), and a Japanese-inspired room with a huge bed and Samurai swords everywhere. He wanted me to paint every room in the place, but he worked from home so he’d be there every day. He scared me so I told him I couldn’t do it.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
I have gone to visit Oxford, MS, to see where Larry Brown lived and drank, I visited Raymond Carver’s grave, I’ve been to Salinas where John Steinbeck lived, went to Missoula to see where James Welch lived his adult life, went to Knockanroe, County Leitrim, Ireland, to see where John McGahern lived, and I know he’s not literary but I went to New Orleans to see the hotel where trombonist Jack Teagarden died. I love the way Jack Teagarden sang. My goal is to visit Albany, NY, so I can see where William Kennedy lives. My dream would be to have a drink with him and talk about his novel Ironweed and of course Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game.
What scares you the most as a writer?
Jesus, well... I guess I wish I was smarter. Knowing you’re only you is always rough when thinking about writing.
Offer a favorite sentence from another writer.
"The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business" (John Steinbeck). The other I think about daily is by Mark Twain: "When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained." I have to say that to myself most every day as a sort of explanation of why the world is the way it is.
Describe a recurring dream.
For years I used to dream every night I was in a part of Reno that didn’t exist. I’d spend all night going from classic club to classic club. And inside the clubs were great old jazz bands from the era of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven. I got free drinks and everyone was always nice to me and I was always dressed up. For a guy who has such a dark mind, my dreams are usually heaven.
Name a guilty pleasure you partake in regularly.
As I said earlier, I can’t seem to go a day without listening to audiobooks. I love institution food, donuts, westerns and pulp novels from the 1930s. I used to be obsessed with The Young and the Restless soap opera, and I can spend hours a day watching Willie Nelson videos on YouTube.
My favorite donut shop in Portland.
What's the best advice you’ve ever received?
Don’t spend more than you make and even if you can only save 20 bucks a month, save it.
Top Five Books I Buy and Give Away as Presents:
These are novels that I seem to always buy and give away as presents. They are the ones next to my bed and the ones I have special editions of. They are also the ones I wish I wrote and inspire me to keep trying. They’re also some of my best pals. In no particular order:
Ironweed by William Kennedy
Fat City by Leonard Gardner
Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines
The Death of Jim Loney by James Welch
÷ ÷ ÷
Born and raised in Reno, Nevada, Willy Vlautin is the author of six novels and is the founder of the bands Richmond Fontaine and The Delines. Vlautin started writing stories and songs at the age of 11 after receiving his first guitar. Inspired by songwriters and novelists like Paul Kelly, Willie Nelson, Tom Waits, William Kennedy, Barry Gifford, and John Steinbeck, Vlautin works diligently to tell working class stories in his novels and songs.
Vlautin has been the recipient of three Oregon Book Awards, The Nevada Silver Pen Award, and was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame and the Oregon Music Hall of Fame. He was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and was shortlisted for the Impac Award (International Dublin Literary Award). Two of his novels, The Motel Life and Lean on Pete, have been adapted as films. His novels have been translated into 11 languages. Vlautin teaches at Pacific University’s MFA in Writing program.
Vlautin lives near Portland, Oregon, with his wife, dog, cats, and horses. The Night Always Comes is his latest book.
MAY 2, 2024BOOKMUNCH
“Hope has a heart that’s beating” – The Horse by Willy Vlautin
IMG_2024-3-12-133756Willy Vlautin – he of The Motel Life and Northline and Lean on Pete and The Free and Don’t Skip Out on Me and The Night Always Comes, books we love – is back with a new novel, The Horse, and you probably won’t be very surprised to learn that, yes, we love this one too.
This is the tale of 65-year-old Al Ward, a guy we meet living alone in a single-room-shack on mining land bequeathed him by his Uncle Vern. His days are more or less the same: he wakes up, puts his fancy rings on, breaks the ice in the water bucket, eats himself some Campbell’s soup and pootles around the edges of songs he’s writing. As he pootles, we get told stories of Al’s past, performing in various bands on the casino circuit. Tales of lost love, tales of punk rock, tales of hard drinking and hard living. Stories of abandonment and loss. (The usual, you might say, if you’re familiar with Vlautin’s oeuvre).
One morning, 65-year-old Al’s routine is broken by the presence of a broken-down horse, possibly blind, eyes swollen shut, on its proverbial last legs. Al doesn’t really know what to do with it. He tries to get it to drink and to eat (spaghetti, among other things), he fights off some coyotes that come a-calling and finally decides he needs to walk the 30 odd miles to the neighbouring ranch in order to get some help. If by this point you aren’t feeling something approximating dread for either Al or the horse, you might want to start over.
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As ever, Vlautin being Vlautin, the dark moments are interspersed with tender hope, as here:
“There’s a guy, I can’t remember who, but he said that when you write a good tune and you know it’s good, and you haven’t played it for anyone, it’s like holding hope in your pocket. And the hope has a heart that’s beating and it rushes through you and all around you. For a moment you’re proud of yourself because you have this little bit of gold that no-one’s heard and you’re the only guy in the world that knows it or feels it or knows how good the tune is. That’s the best feeling.”
It’s not the first book in which music has saved the soul of one of his protagonists (it was true in The Motel Life, Northline and The Free too), but it’s certainly the first book that directly leans into Vlautin’s other life as the frontman of Richmond Fontaine and primary songwriter of The Delines. So, as you’d expect, it thrums with authenticity. A lovely foreword (available in the proof and hopefully the finished book) touches upon how Vlautin saw both the horse and the one-room shack (telling a friend he could see himself living out his days somewhere like that) – sights that obviously sent his creative juices percolating.
Any Cop?: As ever, then, another captivating read from Vlautin. Long may he continue!
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Willy Vlautin
Willy Vlautin
Vlautin at the 2018 Texas Book Festival
Born Willy C. Vlautin[1]
1967 (age 56–57)
Reno, Nevada, U.S.
Occupation Writer, musician
Genre social novel
Notable works The Motel Life, Don't Skip Out On Me,The night always comes
Website
www.willyvlautin.com
Willy C. Vlautin (born 1967) is an American author, musician and songwriter. He was the lead singer, guitarist and songwriter of Portland, Oregon rock band Richmond Fontaine (1994–2016) and is currently a member of The Delines. Born and raised in Reno, Nevada, he has released 14 studio albums since the mid-nineties with Richmond Fontaine while he has written six novels: The Motel Life, Northline, Lean on Pete, The Free, Don't Skip Out On Me and The Night Always Comes.
Career
Music
Vlautin first found success as the lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter in alt-country group Richmond Fontaine.[2] They recorded eleven studio albums and toured extensively in Europe, where they have a particularly strong following, as well as in Australia and the US, before splitting in 2016. Vlautin is currently a member of The Delines.[3] In December 2008 he had released the spoken word EP A Jockey's Christmas, followed by his debut solo album, The Kill Switch, in October 2019.[4]
Numerous references to Richmond Fontaine songs later appeared in Vlautin's prose work. His novel Northline is named after a song from their Winnemucca album, and the protagonist is named for "Allison Johnson", the title of a song on Post to Wire. Both his lyrics and fiction feature Reno's Fitzgerald Hotel as a recurring location.
Writing
Vlautin's first book, The Motel Life was published in 2007 and received critical acclaim.[5][6] It was an editor's choice in the New York Times Book Review and named one of the top 25 books of the year by the Washington Post. Polsky Films released a film adaptation, starring Emile Hirsch, Stephen Dorff, Dakota Fanning and Kris Kristofferson, in November 2013. The film was praised by critics across the US and won three prizes at the Rome International Film Festival: Audience Choice, Best Screenplay, and Editing.
His second novel, Northline,[7][8] was also critically hailed. George Pelecanos chose it as his favorite book of the decade.[citation needed] The first edition of this novel came with an original instrumental soundtrack, performed by Vlautin and Richmond Fontaine bandmate Paul Brainard. Like his songwriting, Vlaudin's fiction is highly evocative of the American West; all three of his novels being set in and around Oregon, Nevada and New Mexico. His books explore the circumstances and relationships of people near the bottom of America's social and economic spectrum, itinerant and often alcoholic.
Vlautin's third novel, Lean on Pete, is the story of a 15-year-old boy who works and lives on a rundown race track in Portland, Oregon, and befriends a failed race horse. The Sunday Herald stated, "Lean on Pete confirms his status as one of the most emotionally charged writers in America..." Eileen Battersby of the Irish Times stated "As one boy’s journey, Lean on Pete is as real as blood: as a novel it is remarkable. Willy Vlautin, romantic and realist, has written something special that will make you shudder, weep, rage and wonder at how such things happen and do, and how some individuals such as Charley can suffer them, absorb the grief, and somehow survive. How good is contemporary US fiction? This good: catch your breath good.”[citation needed] Cheryl Strayed of The Oregonian states "By the time ‘Lean on Pete’ reaches its sweet but unsentimental end, Charley Thompson isn't a character in a novel, but a boy readers have come to love. ‘Lean on Pete’ riveted me. Reading it, I was heartbroken and moved; enthralled and convinced. This is serious American literature."[citation needed] Lean on Pete won two Oregon Book Awards: the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction and the Peoples Choice Award. A movie based on the book was released in 2017.
Accolades
He received the Silver Pen Award from the University of Nevada, Reno Friends of the University Library in 2007 and was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame in 2016.[9]
Influences
Vlautin has cited writers such as John Steinbeck, Raymond Carver, Barry Gifford, Sam Shepard, and William Kennedy as influences.[10] As a songwriter, he has been inspired by the work of Tom Waits, Shane MacGowan, John Doe, and Australian musician Paul Kelly .[11]
Selected bibliography
The Motel Life (2006)
Northline (2008)
Lean on Pete (2010)
The Free (2014)
Don't Skip Out On Me (2018)
The Night Always Comes (2021)
Interview with Willy Vlautin: “In writing, you take a wrong turn and a year of work goes by.”
MARCH 13, 2023
Written by
FAMOUS WRITING ROUTINES
0
Born and raised in Reno, Nevada, Willy Vlautin is the author of six novels and is the founder of the bands Richmond Fontaine and The Delines.
Vlautin started writing stories and songs at the age of eleven after receiving his first guitar. Inspired by songwriters and novelists Paul Kelly, Willie Nelson, Tom Waits, William Kennedy, Raymond Carver, and John Steinbeck, Vlautin works diligently to tell working class stories in his novels and songs.
Vlautin has been the recipient of three Oregon Book Awards, The Nevada Silver Pen Award, and was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame and the Oregon Music Hall of Fame. He was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and was shortlisted for the Impac Award (International Dublin Literary Award). Two of his novels, The Motel Life and Lean on Pete, have been adapted as films. His novels have been translated into eleven languages.
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Hi Willy, great to have you here with us today! You’ve described yourself as being inspired by both songwriters and novelists like Willie Nelson, Raymond Carver, and John Steinbeck. What is it about these artists that have influenced your work, and what do you think they have in common?
Willie Nelson is my personal saint because he was the hippie that made it into my house. He was the only hippie lefty long-haired Django loving man that my mother accepted. She was seriously conservative but somehow Willie got a pass. No one else got a pass but he sure did so I’ve always admired him for that and he’s always been my favorite guitar player. Since I was seven or so he’s been my guitar hero.
Carver made a lot of sense to me as a kid stylistically but most importantly because so many of his stories were about alcoholic men carried by women. Those were stories I knew and before reading Carver I didn’t know you could write stories like that. Stories of people circling the drain in a very working-class undramatic yet dramatic way. His books gave me permission to tell the stories I could tell.
Steinbeck, well I was taught six of his novels in junior high and high school. I don’t know what was going on in the Reno school district at the time but Steinbeck was king. So I was spoon fed him at an early age and I seriously loved him. From the beginning I wanted to write working class stories and he was my map of how to do it. As a kid I had a picture of him by my bed, next to pictures of The Jam and The Clash and Rank & File and X. I thought of him like that, a hero.
Ursula K. Le Guin has described you as “an unsentimental Steinbeck” and Lidia Yuknavitch has called you a “real and profoundly useful saint.” How do you feel about these comparisons to such revered writers, and how do you approach writing in a way that is both empathetic and unsentimental?
Ah man, it’s lucky when you hear something like that. They are both heavyweights. I remember meeting Ursula and saying to myself don’t swear, suck in your gut, try to act smart. Jesus, she was the best. Always so tough and outspoken and a such beautiful writer. I can’t say enough great things about her. And when I met Lidia I did the same thing.
I told myself don’t swear, suck in your gut, act smart, and then she gave me a big momma bear hug and looked at me like a guru and we were instantly friends. I swear after being around her for less than an hour I would have robbed a bank for her. She’s just got that thing. Again an amazing writer and person. The Northwest has been lucky to have such great writers and protectors of literature and libraries.
And on empathy, novels to me are about empathy, to live inside another’s world. That’s why it’s the greatest art form and why it’s brought me so much comfort. If you find the right book you’re not alone in the world anymore. And on being sentimental, well, I try not to be sentimental because I’ve been raised and taught never to be. It probably wouldn’t hurt my mind to be a little bit more sentimental. God knows it needs help.
Your novels often focus on working-class people and their struggles. What draws you to these stories, and how do you approach writing about characters who are often overlooked or marginalized in our society?
As I said early it didn’t hurt that I was taught so much by Steinbeck or taught The Jungle while listening to The Jam on repeat. I think I knew early on that life could be tough. My mom struggled. She had a hard time mentally and was left with two little kids, was nearly thirty, and hadn’t had a real job before. So she had to fight it out. She was tough. She got a job, kept us afloat, and got paid less than men, was sexually harassed by her male co-workers and bosses.
This went on for years and before she got a boyfriend, it was me and my brother who she gave the blow by blows to. So when I started writing I always thought about her situation. Why can’t she be a hero? To me it’s heroic not to give up. Why can’t a janitor be a hero or your favorite waitress? And sadly, the truth is I was a janitor and for years worked in warehouses and painted houses. It was all I knew to write about.
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You’ve had two of your novels adapted into films, The Motel Life and Lean on Pete. What was it like to see your work translated into a different medium, and how involved were you in the adaptation process?
I wasn’t that involved. Mostly I just showed both directors around. For The Motel Life I took them around Reno and for Lean on Pete, around Portland. Both experiences were great. I love Andrew Haigh, who did Lean on Pete. He’s become a friend. He’s a serious ace. I didn’t write the screenplay for either so I was pretty hands off that way. I’d been hired once to write a screenplay and I spent six months stewing over it, and when I sent it off I got a check but I never found out if anyone had ever read it. After that I decided to stick to novels.
Can you tell us a bit about your latest novel, The Night Always Comes, and what inspired you to write it?
Six or seven years ago I was driving on the outskirts of Portland and I pulled over and counted the industrial cranes downtown. There were thirteen, meaning thirteen new buildings were in the process of going up. Portland had become a real boomtown. I have an office in a neighborhood called St. Johns, an old working-class neighborhood. I started seeing the mom-and-pop businesses there selling out.
At one point on the main drag nearly half of the businesses were closed. If you were from out of town you’d have thought it was a neighborhood in a state of failure. But the opposite was true. The old businesses had sold out for a payday and the new owners were waiting for permits to tear the old buildings down. The problem was the county was overwhelmed with permit requests so for months and months they stayed vacant. It was crazy.
From my office I can see five new apartment buildings that have gone up in less than seven years. Housing prices in Portland have gone up four times in less than twenty years while minimum wage has gone up only twice. So here you have all these new apartment buildings popping up everywhere and at the same time suddenly people are living in tents on city sidewalks.
Semi-permanent tent communities began appearing. Hundreds of them. For a while St. Johns had guys living in tents on the sidewalk outside this new apartment building. The guys were all under forty. People were walking in the street to avoid them because they were young and partying. It was hard to wrap your head around. It felt out of control.
I started thinking about how working-class families would deal with this explosion of growth and housing costs and homelessness. What if you were barely getting by before this boom? What do you do then? I decided I’d pick one dysfunctional family and see how they dealt with it. That’s how it started. I knew I wanted the book to have a real sense of panic to it. I framed it that way to give it that sort of feel. Very panicky and noir.
All over the West cities are struggling with this: explosions in growth and housing prices and homelessness. Beat-up working-class houses are suddenly out of reach for the people they were built for. And where I got stuck is, if the true American dream is home ownership, then what are families to do who are spoon fed that idea from birth? And who are all these people who have the money to buy these houses and rent these apartment buildings? And where are they all coming from?
The Night Always Comes explores the themes of the American dream and the impact of gentrification on working-class lives. What drew you to these themes, and why do you think they are important to explore in literature?
Literary communities and publishers have always been a bit hesitant to embrace working class fiction. Maybe it’s as simple as that the buying audience doesn’t want to read them. The buying audience is usually middle class to upper middle class. Working class people don’t often read novels and if they do, they don’t often want to read working-class stories. But to me, they are the most important stories of all. They have always been my favorite stories to read anyway. They always bring me the most comfort.
The novel has been described as a “soulful thriller for the age of soulless gentrification.” Can you speak to the noir-ish aspects of the story, and how you balanced the thriller elements with the deeper, more emotional aspects of the story?
I’ve loved noir for a long time. I was introduced to it by Black Lizard Press when I was in my early twenties. That’s how discovered Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Charles Willeford. Eventually I read most of the books on Black Lizard. I’ve always thought, in general, that noir was psychologically damaged writers writing about psychologically damaged characters.
All with a sense of failure and panic and circling the drain in the blood of them. I loved those books. They were short and wild and undone. They hit a real nerve with me. As I’ve gotten older, crime writers like George Pelecanos have meant a lot to me. Pelecanos writes real political working class novels. To me writers like that really keep working class stories alive. They just frame it as a crime.
For The Night Always Comes I tried to do the same. Make it nerve wracking and fast and edgy but also I wanted it to be a story about one family’s struggle to navigate getting priced out of their neighborhood while also struggling with their dysfunction and inability to work together.
The Night Always Comes is your sixth novel. How do you feel your writing has evolved over the course of your career, and what have you learned about yourself as a writer?
I guess at times I think I’m doing better at it and other times I’m not so sure. I’m always surprised how hard each one is to write. How I always take a left turn when I should have gone right. The problem is, in writing, you take a wrong turn and a year of work goes by. Those are hard days when you realize you should have stayed left but you didn’t and now you have to shelve hundreds of pages of work.
If you could have a conversation with any author throughout history about their writing routine and creative process, who would that person be?
Ah there’s a lot but right now tonight, well, Lucia Berlin. I would have loved to have met her and taken her out to dinner. Or Jean Rhys. And Jim Thompson. I’d love to see how that guy’s mind worked. He was a wild one. Maybe Frank O’Conner, that guy wrote such great short stories. Primo Levi too, James Welch and William Kennedy. Charles Willeford and Flannery O’Conner. I could go on and on.
I’d love to know about the books you’re reading at the moment. What have been some of your favorite recent reads?
Right now I’m on a huge Robert Laxalt kick. He was a Basque Nevada writer and I’m going through his whole collection. I’ve also been obsessed with Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These. It’s my favorite book of the last few years. I think I’ve read it three times and listened to it once. I like books about boxing and I just read Kellie by Roddy Doyle and Kellie Harrington. It’s amazing. I love Roddy Doyle. A friend of mine just got me a Ross MacDonald novel. I’ve never read him so that’s up next. Also I’m reading poetry by Joe Millar and Geno Leech, a cool poet/fisherman from Washington State.
What does your current writing workspace look like?
Like I said I have a great office on the second floor of this old building in St. John’s/Portland. I overlook a bar called Slims. They have benches outside it and I can see guys drinking and smoking from eight in the morning. It always boosts my confidence that I’m working and not there. It makes me feel good about myself! Next to the bar a guitar shop just opened and one of my oldest friends works there so I’m pretty set. In the room itself I have a desk and a couch. The great writer Barry Gifford once told me all you need is a desk and couch. He’s smarter than me so I took his advice.
Vlautin, Willy THE HORSE Harper/HarperCollins (Fiction None) $25.99 7, 30 ISBN: 9780063346574
Helping a sick horse gives a washed-up musician in his 60s a chance to make peace with his past.
"Please," whispers Al Ward, "please give me the strength to pull the trigger and let it be over." Al isn't contemplating suicide. An old horse has wandered into the abandoned Nevada mining camp that Al calls home, and he wants to put it out of its misery. The camp belonged to his late great-uncle Mel, who mined it for years with no success. Al would stay there and dry out whenever the excesses of life as a journeyman guitarist and songwriter became too much. But now the horse, scarred and bleeding from a coyote bite, intrudes on the camp, where Al has been holed up and hiding from his demons. The horse doesn't do anything to provoke him. It just stands there in the snow, right outside the assayer's office where Al sleeps, eats, thinks, and still writes songs by lantern light. When Al decides to show mercy and points his old .357 at the animal, he tearfully realizes that he can't kill the poor beast "because he felt that he and the horse were the same." It's a familiar, oft-told story of someone unexpectedly finding healing in the presence of an animal, but Vlautin makes that trope his own. His writing style is spare, restrained, unsentimental, yet full of emotion and force. A songwriter and band frontman, Vlautin understands the ups and downs of a touring musician's life, and his experiences inform Al's long career playing casinos from Las Vegas to Reno to Tahoe and beyond. Al has a gift for songwriting, and plenty of tortured musicians--including heartbreaker Mona and the self-destructive Sanchez Brothers--clamored after him to write hits for them. Al never wished for much in life, only, as he says of the horse, to "be all right and live an all right life." He's managed to have plenty of all right moments, especially during his short-lived marriage to his true love, Maxine. Helping the horse might give him a chance to have another one. After Al makes a long trek to get help, a friend teases him that what he's done "says something. Most people wouldn't cross the street to do something decent, and you walked thirty miles in the snow, and you're a drunk, lazy musician." But Al's risky walk shows he's more than that; he's still full of surprises.
Anyone who's hit rock bottom can still get a shot at redemption if they're willing to do what it takes.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Vlautin, Willy: THE HORSE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A797463106/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3f03f73c. Accessed 12 July 2024.
Short Dog: Cab Driver Stories from the L.A. Streets
Dan Fante. Black Sparrow, $15.95 trade paper
(128p) ISBN 978-1-57423-249-3
This shaggy, gritty collection from Fante (1944-2015) follows the travails of his alter-ego cab driver, Bruno Dante, who has appeared in such works as Chump Change. Fante add juice and color to the episodes by drawing, as Willy Vlautin notes in an introduction, from his own experiences driving a cab in Los Angeles. Bruno's cab is a "rattling Chevy"; politicians are "rectumless bureaucrats"; his wild friend Libby is "an alumnus of the Keith Richards school of beauty." There are echoes of Burroughs and Kerouac in the sordid exploits, which include dealing with a voracious python, the title character of the story "Princess"; losing a cushy daily fare because of interference by a hotel doorman Bruno calls "Wifebeater Bob"; and waking up in a movie theater next to a trans woman after a Mad Dog 20/20-fueled blackout. Hard drinking figures prominently, both as the cause of Bruno's messy personal life and as the fuel for his creative energy as a writer. Fante was also a playwright, and the longest piece, as well as the least successful, is a one-act two-hander between Fante and a slick aspiring actor he calls "Thebobby." Fante's raunchy, dynamic voice occasionally soars in this mixed bag of outrageous episodes. (July)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 PWxyz, LLC
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"Short Dog: Cab Driver Stories from the L.A. Streets." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 22, 31 May 2021, p. 35. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A664617197/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8cb8b839. Accessed 12 July 2024.
Vlautin, Willy THE NIGHT ALWAYS COMES Harper/HarperCollins (Fiction None) $26.99 4, 6 ISBN: 978-0-06303-508-9
Need propels a heroine's long night of the soul.
Vlautin’s fiction is full of working-class strugglers doing their best to survive a rapidly changing country. Most of them, including the protagonists of his propulsive new novel, have been priced out of comfortable living, or even stability. And so they turn to unsavory means to get by. This book plays out like a modern noir take on a Tennessee Williams play, its desperate characters harboring old resentments, its hard-luck heroine settling scores throughout a long, bloody night in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. Thirty-year-old Lynette wants to buy the run-down rental house she shares with her embittered mother and her developmentally challenged brother. But she needs cash, especially after her mom’s most recent starburst of irresponsibility. She’s owed money around town, and it’s time to collect—and then some. Vlautin’s supporting characters—meth-heads and pimps, waitresses and mechanics—occupy a rung of society that rarely gets its story told in any kind of convincing way. His language is always vivid. Here’s Lynette studying a tweaker: “Bursting red blisters ran from the back of his neck, around his left ear, and completely engulfed his left eye and forehead. He was young, in his twenties, but his teeth had gone bad and his eyes looked pushed into his head like an old man’s.” Such is the company that Lynette comes to keep in her quest for an instant nest egg. Her nocturnal journey is gripping, but much of the book’s power derives from more quotidian questions: Can I get a loan to make that down payment on the house? Can I balance that introduction to econ class with my two jobs? Will my car start? And what happened to my city? “I’m realizing that the whole city is starting to haunt me,” Lynette tells a friend. “And all the new places, all the big new buildings, just remind me that I’m nothing, that I’m nobody.” Vlautin has written a soulful thriller for the age of soulless gentrification.
A working-class drama finds the grit beneath Portland's gentrification.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Vlautin, Willy: THE NIGHT ALWAYS COMES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A650107699/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=126346e6. Accessed 12 July 2024.
The Night Always Comes. By Willy Vlautin. Mar. 2021. 288p. Harper, $26.99 (9780063035089); e-book (9780063035102).
Vlautin's emotionally wrenching tales of the working-class poor typically feature characters trapped in a deadly undertow of economic hardship, compounded by wrong choices made for the right reasons. So it is this time, as Vlautin moves from the country-noir landscape of Don't Skip Out on Me (2018) to the overlooked underclass in gentrifying, superhip Portland, Oregon. Thirty-year-old waitress Lynette has made plenty of wrong choices (drugs, alcohol, and men, among them), but she has remained focused on saving enough money (however ill-gotten) to buy the house where she lives with her mother and developmentally challenged brother. She's close to being there when her mother uses part of the money to buy a car, leaving the kitty short with the owners deadline approaching. Desperate to make up the difference, Lynette embarks on a two-day rampage into the heart of darkness, culminating with an oudandish scheme to steal a safe. Vlautin never lets us forget that hovering over Lynette's Hail Mary pass at salvation is the specter of gentrification: "The whole city is starting to haunt me... all the new places, the big new buildings, just remind me that I'm nothing, that I'm nobody." Her friend, Shirley, begs to differ: "You never give up and you've got a good heart, a damaged heart, but a good heart." We concur, of course, and race to the end to see if good hearts can maybe, just this once, make a difference. With Vlautin, you never know for sure.--Bill Ott
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Ott, Bill. "The Night Always Comes." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 12, 15 Feb. 2021, p. 25. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A654649913/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6494dce6. Accessed 12 July 2024.
THE NIGHT ALWAYS COMES By Willy Vlautin
Craftsman and small clapboard houses still dot the streets of Portland, Ore., as they have for over a century, but next to them now you will find walls of steel and glass stretching up into the city's gray skies. If you're familiar with the area, the sight may be chilling. These condos stand in the place of old churches and Boys & Girls Clubs, on lots purchased by developers and sold by families who often had little choice. You may get a sense, looking at half-built 12-unit condominiums with rents twice as high as those families' mortgages, that they're not just replacing the old ways of Portland. They may be replacing everyone who can't keep up.
Lynette, the protagonist of Willy Vlautin's determined new novel, ''The Night Always Comes,'' feels the dread of Portland's transformation down to her bones. This is a novel that lives firmly in the melancholia of the city's gentrification, hurtling readers through one woman's desperation to keep her life afloat in a city that's pushing its working class out, one razed lot at a time.
For years Lynette has been up at 4 a.m. every day. She works two jobs while attending community college and caring for a brother with developmental disabilities (Vlautin never specifies his condition). She does all this with a single goal in mind: to raise enough money to put a down payment on the house her family has lived in for Lynette's whole life. That down payment, in combination with a loan to be taken out by her mother, is the only way for the three to stay together. After years of depression and rage she's worked hard to control, Lynette is bent on controlling this as well. Her dream is simply to chart a future for her family that would allow them to live without the looming specter of displacement.
But when Lynette's mother reneges on the deal, that dream disappears in an instant. Lynette spirals, and most of the novel takes place over a single night as she tears feverishly through Portland, chasing down any lead that might result in some extra cash that could right the situation. Most of the people Lynette meets on this tragic, desperate night do not react kindly, and as the evening turns violent the exhaustion and isolation of her poverty ring clear as day.
The novel, Vlautin's sixth, stalls out during its many long monologues spelling out exactly what each character is thinking in clunky detail. Vlautin's etchings of the city's poor, white population are at times overwrought, especially around the topic of weight, as are the inner lives of anyone who's not the main character. That tendency is extra egregious when it comes to Lynette's mother, a dreary antagonist whose motives no number of monologues manage to three-dimensionalize.
The novel regains its footing, though, in the moments where we get to live in Lynette's inner world. ''The whole city is starting to haunt me,'' Lynette says in the novel's most potent scene. ''All the new places, all the big new buildings, just remind me that I'm nothing, that I'm nobody.'' The central question of her night resonates beyond this one family: Can one person be built to sink, or is she set up to fail by an entire system designed to keep the poor not just working, but hurting? Anyone who's scrambled within the confines of poverty may relate to Lynette's quest for agency over her own fate. With ''The Night Always Comes,'' Vlautin chronicles the downfall of a city. As Lynette's story illustrates, it's an undoing that is deeply personal, too.
Alanna Bennett is a screenwriter for ''Roswell, New Mexico.'' Her culture writing has appeared in BuzzFeed, Teen Vogue, Eater and more. THE NIGHT ALWAYS COMES By Willy Vlautin 208 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.
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PHOTO: (PHOTOGRAPH BY Agata Nowicka FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Bennett, Alanna. "Down and Out in Portland." The New York Times Book Review, 25 Apr. 2021, p. 16(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A659556080/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f29fc8df. Accessed 12 July 2024.
Byline: Jack Wareham
English indie writer-director Andrew Haigh had trepidations about making a boy-and-horse-centered film. After all, the worn-out genre carries some embarrassing baggage, ranging from the uninspired "Seabiscuit" to the hammy "War Horse."
These films consistently disappoint because they rely on a cheap trick -- sentimentalizing animal suffering to jerk tears from the audience. The directors will show a close-up of the horse's eyes, inviting us to project human feelings onto an animal that is incapable of complex emotional thought. Surely this is one of the crudest forms of filmmaking, because our empathy for animals is instinctive -- causing the audience to shed a few tears is an easy feat.
In his new film, "Lean on Pete," Haigh decided to totally avoid the mawkishness that most animal films emphasize.
"People want sentimentality, because sentimentality does make things easier," Haigh said in an interview with The Daily Californian. "It makes it more palatable. It makes it simpler emotionally, because you understand: 'Oh, I'm supposed to feel sad now.' ... I don't necessarily want the audience to know exactly how they should be feeling."
The film, which centers around 15-year-old Charley Thompson's (Charlie Plummer) attempt to save a racehorse from slaughter, feels like a radical departure for Haigh. His second feature and first large success, "Weekend," was an intimate character study of two gay men in England over a couple of days.
In contrast, "Lean on Pete" feels almost like an epic, spanning hundreds of miles and many weeks, all while hosting a large cast including Steve Buscemi, Chloe Sevigny and Travis Fimmel. According to Haigh, no producers would have given him the budget to make "Lean on Pete" in the beginning of his career, but his early successes paved the way for him to make a larger film.
While both "Weekend" and his subsequent film, "45 Years," took place in England, "Lean on Pete" unfolds in the Pacific Northwest. And yet, despite his English background, Haigh demonstrates a palpable feeling for the American landscape. Although he partly attributes this familiarity to re-watching Wim Wenders' "Paris, Texas" -- another film about America from a European perspective -- he also decided to immerse himself in Oregon culture before beginning to work on the film.
"Before I even wrote the script, I was out traveling around for four months. Just going to racetracks, going to diners. ... I stayed in a motel in Burns, down in Eastern Oregon, for a week. Going to the Apple Peddler, eating their food and writing the scene that was set in the Apple Peddler," Haigh explained.
Haigh's extensive research also involved searching for and casting the lead character, Charley. Out of the hundreds of auditions, Haigh instantly knew that Plummer was right for the role, as his tape displayed the perfect blend of "sensitivity and subtlety." Part of what Haigh liked about Charley as a character was his emotional distance. He's not quick to reveal his feelings, so much of his thoughts are left for audience speculation.
"I don't want you to be able to understand every single thing that this character is thinking, because you can't. Just like I can't understand everything you're thinking, you can't understand everything I'm thinking. And I don't like it in films when I understand too much," Haigh said.
And yet, much of the allure of Plummer's performance is his emotional sensitivity; he acts with an impressive balance of restraint and depth. Haigh explained that he loved Plummer's ability to both keep the audience at a distance while also drawing them in emotionally.
Haigh fell in love with the character when he first read the novel of the same title by Willy Vlautin. "You just feel it in your gut when you know that something feels right," Haigh said. "And I try not to analyze it too much in the early stages, because you end up analyzing it to death, and then it kind of destroys itself for you. But there was just something about this book."
That "something" that makes the book special has clearly translated into the film, which is imbued with a sense of both tragedy and passion. As Charley traverses Oregon with a racehorse, Pete, one gets the feeling that he's more alone than he thinks. In fact, Haigh's ability to create true tragedy without sentimentality is the true achievement of "Lean on Pete."
"It's very sad to me that the only person he can really be honest to is a horse that cannot understand him and cannot help him," Haigh said. "He hasn't even got a friend that he can sit down to and talk to. He's got nobody. He's only got a horse. And to me, that's pretty tragic and sad."
Contact Jack Wareham at [email protected].
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 ULOOP Inc.
http://uwire.com/?s=UWIRE+Text&x=26&y=14&=Go
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Wareham, Jack. "'Lean on Pete' offers tragic Oregonian odyssey: An interview with writer-director Andrew Haigh." UWIRE Text, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 1. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A533946220/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=de02b1c4. Accessed 12 July 2024.
THE NIGHT ALWAYS COMES
WILLY VLAUTIN
224pp. Faber. Paperback, 12.99 [pounds sterling].
IN HIS GUISE AS THE FRONTMAN of the now-defunct rock band Richmond Fontaine, Willy Vlautin once sang: "The years blurred until I barely recognized my own face / Years I spent trying the same way and living in the same place". Vlautin's fiction and lyrics follow John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie in their focus on America's downtrodden, and their grinding, iterant lives in the land of freedom. A typical Vlautin character is beleaguered not just by the constrictions of their slim means, or the meanness of those around them, but by an unshakeable guilt over what they have done in order to survive: a brighter future never comes without cost, the author seems to say, and the past is something you can only escape for so long.
In Don't Skip Out on Me (2018), Horace Hopper leaves home and heads south with dreams of becoming a boxer, only to realize that "when he was alone on the ranch he had the dream of the city, the dream of what he would become ... But now he was there and he was still alone. He was just himself in another place". In Northline (2007), the twenty-one-year-old Allison Johnson is told that, "There's no place where there aren't weirdos and death and violence and change and new people. You head up to Wyoming or Montana and you'll run into the same things as you do in Vegas or New Orleans. You'll run into yourself".
In the opening scene of Vlautin's sixth novel, The Night Always Comes, thirty-year-old Lynette is awoken at 3am by her severely disabled brother Kenny and pleads with him for fifteen minutes more sleep. "Every morning it's the same thing." They share a dilapidated house in a rapidly gentrifying area of Portland with their mother, Doreen. Their landlord has offered to sell the house to them at a reduced rate, which Lynette has saved for by working two jobs, and by sleeping with men who deny her even the most basic decency: "he wouldn't pay her until the end of the night. By then he didn't want her any more". Her plans for the house are derailed at the eleventh hour by Doreen, who instead spends her portion of the down payment on a new car. When Lynette demands an explanation, her mother is initially evasive but finally relents: "it's a house I hate. A house that you've tried to kill yourself in, a house that's been like a prison since Kenny was born, a house that your father abandoned us in".
Vlautin's novels, with their neat, spare prose and well-tuned dialogue, might sit under the label of "dirty realism" (a term coined by Bill Buford in Granta): a genre of formal minimalism interested in members of the working class and the precarity of their lives under capitalism. In a country marked by a great wealth gap, growing political disillusionment and the increasing power of barely regulated mega-companies, characters like Doreen seem to have little freedom beyond for what they choose to buy (or not buy), and Vlautin shows a clear sympathy with their positions.
Over the course of forty-eight hours, in a desperate attempt to get the money for the house, Lynette is forced to call in various debts across the city. Her friend Gloria, who has lied her way from nothing to becoming a well-looked-after escort, declines to pay, leading Lynette to enlist the ex-con Cody into robbing her. What follows is a tense and vicious series of betrayals that leave Lynette's spirit almost totally crushed.
Vlautin is a fine writer, his books engaged and resonant, but he is not without his faults. Critics have compared him to Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson, and while there is some truth to this when he is at his best, these are generous readings: we struggle to find much trace of Carver's carefully placed ambiguity, or of Johnson's poetic sentence construction. The quick, episodic format of Vlautin's books at times makes them feel harried, their events far-fetched. (They are also somewhat suspect in their unpleasantness: of Vlautin's two female leads, both are subjected to repeated acts of sexual violence.) Vlautin's compassion for his subjects sometimes makes him stray off course, as characters veer into expository monologues or didactic little parables that all too bluntly advance the author's own well-intentioned politics. There is perhaps something rather glib in the epigraph to The Night Always Comes that arrives courtesy of "The 45th President of the United States of America": "The point is that you can't be too greedy".
George Berridge works at the TLS
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
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Berridge, George. "Survivor's guilt: The land of freedom and betrayal." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6166, 4 June 2021, p. 17. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A667421083/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b62079c3. Accessed 12 July 2024.
Don't Skip Out On Me
Willy Vlautin
Faber & Faber, 304pp. 14.99 [pounds sterling]
Over four previous novels Willy Vlautin has quietly crafted a body of work a world away from the perceived big-hitters of contemporary American fiction. Yet any one of his books offers as valuable an insight into the day-to-day grind of existence in a country whose dream has long turned sour as anything published this century.
In small scenarios he tackles big themes such as loss and loneliness, almost always against backgrounds of transience, poverty and the endless battle of simply getting by. His characters are not restless wanderers, but rather survivors questing towards the chance of a better life. Their situations are harsh but, crucially, never entirely devoid of hope. Vlautin's debut The Motel Life concerned two brothers on the lam after a tragic hit and run accident, while Lean On Pete (adapted for a forthcoming film by the British director Andrew Haigh) beautifully explored the relationship between a teenage boy and a failing racehorse. As in his songs (as a musician Vlautin is best known for his work with the band Richmond Fontaine) these are lives that pivot on luck or resourcefulness, with reviewers drawing comparisons to Steinbeck and Carver, though I'd stir Denis Johnson, Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen into the mix too.
Don't Skip Out On Me tracks the journey of 21-year-old Horace Hopper, a half-Paiute Indian, half-white Nevadan ranch worker who was abandoned as a child to a "a grandmother who drank Coors Light on ice from nam until she fell asleep on the couch at nine, who chain-smoked cigarettes, who ate only frozen dinners, and who was scared of Indians, blacks and Mexicans".
Horace is also an aspiring boxer. He finds employment and surrogate love from goodhearted ageing rancher Mr Reese and his housebound wife, who want to gift him their family business, but his ambitions in the ring prove too great. Reasoning that all the best fighters are Mexican he moves to Tucson, Arizona, where he reinvents himself as "Hector Hidalgo" by adopting Hispanic clothes, eating spicy food that he dislikes and finding a Mexican trainer, who rips him off.
Fights come his way, brutal undercard 2 battles in which Horace/Hector takes frequent beatings, but is often saved by his big-punching abilities. Rarely has the aftermath of boxing been so well portrayed: the sobbing in the shower, the reset noses, the constant need for codeine. And the emotional scars too.
For at the core of Don't Skip Out On Me lies a deep well of existential emptiness that is distinctly American. The expansive mirage of the country--"Texas is just a line in the dirt," shrugs one character--and the empty promise of consumerism found in drab retail parks and fast food diners amplify the young Horace's solitude and his slim chances of success. Vlautin is hardly the first to note the overwhelming sadness of a neon sign flickering in the darkness or miles of empty car parks where fields once stood, but his are scenes bathed in pathos. Alone beside a strip mall Hector watches the cars pass by: "Every single person in every single car had a TV, a phone, a bed, and ate chicken and got the runs. How many chickens got killed every day?"
Food features heavily throughout, but it is only ever cheap and functional, consumed for quick gratification and always with a nauseous belched-back aftertaste. Stifling heat plays its part too; the pages of this book almost feel slick with the border states' sweat. The prose smells of synthetic sugar, salt, frying oil, locker rooms and desperation.
Vlautin is particularly adept at fleeting encounters and sorrowful glimpses that add a Homeric dimension. An immigrant shepherd tending to Mr Reese's flock has a complete mental collapse high in the mountains. A pregnant woman and her toddler are stranded at a Greyhound bus stop, her diaper bag and the child's stuffed rabbit continuing the journey without them. When he discovers two teenage stowaways in the back of his truck en route to Mexico, Mr Reese sees that their maltreated dog has worms, an eye infection and an injured paw, and buys it off them for $50. A desperate life is made a little better. Such moments are what elevate Vlautin to literary greatness: he understands the necessity for compassion through small acts of kindness.
Ultimately, Horace's core strength is engulfed by his overwhelming alienation when he washes up in Las Vegas, the vulgar end-point of America's briefly glorious boom-time. Vlautin's characters are the walking wounded yet manage to carry themselves with dignity, and only a reader with a heart of anthracite could be unmoved by their situations. They continue to live on long after Don't Skip Out On Me has ended in devastating style.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
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Myers, Ben. "On the ropes." New Statesman, vol. 147, no. 5410, 16 Mar. 2018, p. 47. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A535420111/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ff126806. Accessed 12 July 2024.
Willy Vlautin
DON'T SKIP OUT ON ME
304pp. Faber. Paperback, 14.99 [pounds sterling].
978 0 571 33677 7
The drifter is central to American culture, from the rootsy howl of Bob Dylan to the sickly sheen of Steely Dan; from the stout-hearts of John Steinbeck's dust bowl to Elmore Leonard and his sharp-talking cast of hustlers and sharks. The motif has itself long drifted into cliche, summoning rosy notions of the open road, the "free and satisfied"--to quote Huckleberry Finn--more often than the bleaker truth.
Willy Vlautin's drifters are squarely at the social realism end of the scale. Horace Hopper, the young man at the heart of Don't Skip Out on Me, is a half-white, half-Paiute Indian farm hand. Hopper's mother abandoned him as a child to a grandmother who "drank Coors Light on ice from 11 a.m until she fell asleep on the couch at 9". Now (at the start of the novel) he lives with a supportive and sweetly decent couple--his proxy parents--on their ranch in Tonopah, Nevada.
Tormented by feelings of failure, Hopper dreams of making it as a boxer, so he ups sticks and, posing as a Mexican, because "Paiutes aren't good for anything", takes the Greyhound to Tucson to find a trainer. Enter Ruiz, a con man who rips Hopper off and underprepares him for progressively more challenging fights. Despite his lack of technique, Hopper outlasts his initial opponents, for he is a "brawler" with a sledgehammer fist. He pays for his success in blood, and more. The lonely aftermaths of each fight--in which Hopper contends with temporary blindness and cracked ribs, necks codeine and sticks Kleenex up his bleeding, broken nose--provide the novel's most distressing scenes.
Vlautin is a musician as well as a novelist--for more than twenty years he has fronted the alt-country band Richmond Fontaine--and in both his songs and prose he deals in vivid, sympathetic snapshots of lives on the edge of society; booze-soaked characters in and out of dead-end jobs. His main subjects are blue-collar: familiar territory for American song but rather less so for the contemporary American novel, which must be why Raymond Carver--cited by Vlautin as his decisive influence--comes up in almost every article about him.
Yet this comparison only goes so far. Like Carver's, the world of Don't Skip Out on Me is built from plainly written detail: "He wore bifocals, a stained straw cowboy hat, dirty jeans and a green threadbare western shirt". Every item Hopper eats is listed: "a man wearing a green suit bought his two hot dogs, Red Vines and Coke". But there is something crude about the way Vlautin uses Hopper's weakness for junk food, which edges towards a nannying social commentary about the diet of the poor. At times the characters seem written rather too directly in the service of "awareness raising", as if the author is more concerned with highlighting the plight of those who have nothing than with presenting a sophisticated and complex world.
Vlautin's lyrics carry some of the restrained, oblique quality of a Carver short story, but stretched to novel length, his tale's moral universe is too simple to bear comparison with the great flag-bearer of "dirty realism". "We hate poetry that has a palpable design on us", wrote Keats--and although this may be an unfair charge to lay on Vlautin, whose novel is thoughtfully constructed, at times heartrending, and has a powerfully shocking climax, there is a sense of art taking second place to ideology. Don't Skip Out on Me reads like the work of an American Ken Loach, if that's not too far from the open road.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
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Clarke, Daniel. "Continental drift." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5997, 9 Mar. 2018, p. 25. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A634283879/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c34fbef6. Accessed 12 July 2024.
Don't Skip Out on Me
by Willy Vlautin
Faber, 14.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 297
For Horace Hopper, the half-breed protagonist of Willy Vlautin's bleak new novel, essential truths come slowly, and usually too late to do him any good. Abandoned by his Native American mother and Irish American father, he has exiled himself from the only people who love him, an elderly couple on a sheep ranch in deepest Nevada. His one idea for becoming 'somebody' is to transform himself into a world-champion lightweight boxer with a wholly fabricated Mexican identity. 'Mexican boxers are the toughest... true warriors who never quit,' he believes. Only well into the novel does it dawn on him that his self-inflicted loneliness is 'a sort of disease', not a manly test of character that will redeem his young life.
Horace's surrogate father, Eldon Reese, is an atypical westerner, a liberal who knows better than to buy into Horace's 'winners' version of the American dream. Despite his efforts to keep his ward on the ranch, he can't make up for Horace's low selfesteem. When Horace is exploited by greedy trainer-promoters happy to bleed their new fighter both physically and financially, the truth once again catches up with him, in a Tucson emergency room after a particularly brutal match. 'I'm a liar,' he confesses to a nurse. 'I'm not Hector Hidalgo. I'm not Mexican. My real name is Horace Hopper.'
Vlautin is on to something about what's wrong with America, and with many Americans, especially in the age of Trump. According to the publishers, the author is exploring the 'fringes' of US society, but this is a misleading cliche. While in no way privileged, Horace is more rooted than many young men from a similar background. Above and beyond his sense of aloneness, there is something self-defeating in Horace's personality that exemplifies an unfortunate tendency among certain Americans, corporate managers and factory workers alike: even though they boast about rugged independence, they're all too willing to take abuse. Horace 'wasn't bothered by getting hit ... It wasn't that he liked it, exactly; he just didn't mind it.' The problem, as one of his unscrupulous trainers remarks, about Horace's vulnerability in the ring is that 'already you seem to run into punches and it'll get a lot worse when they [future opponents] know your style'.
Eldon Reese has a better idea:
You can take all the best things you are and
be them. I don't know how many times I've
tried to tell you all the great things that come
from being a Paiute and all the great things
that come from being from a small town and
all the great things that come from being part
Irish and 100 per cent Nevadan.
The tension over whose sensibility will prevail makes this book worth reading --but it infuses it with a peculiarly American sort of pain.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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MacArthur, John R. "Boxing not so clever." Spectator, vol. 336, no. 9884, 3 Feb. 2018, pp. 33+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A536091907/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c9466c5e. Accessed 12 July 2024.
Don't Skip Out on Me.
By Willy Vlautin.
Feb. 2018. 288p. HarperPerennial, $22.99 (9780062684455).
Have good-hearted ordinary people ever had to endure as much pain as they do in a Willy Vlautin novel? Perhaps only in real life. Sometimes Vlautin's people come out on the other side, at least for a while, and sometimes they don't, but what can we expect in a world where "if we're lucky we live long enough to see most everything we love die"?That's Mr. Reese talking, and he should know. An anachronistic Nevada sheep farmer with a bad back, he and his wife have spent nearly two decades serving as guardians to Horace Hopper, a half-Paiute, half-Irish young man abandoned by his parents. The Reeses want Horace to take over the ranch, but he has his own dream, and it's a doozy--a dream of asserting himself by becoming a boxer (not just a boxer but, flying in the face of his own ethnic background, a Mexican boxer). So it's off to Tuscon and then to Mexico and then, finally, to Las Vegas, as Horace gamely but futilely tries to follow the advice he has memorized from a self-help book called Build the Champion inside of You.
Add Horace to the long list of those who have gone wrong by reading the wrong books, but like Emma Bovary, who developed delusions of grandeur by reading romance novels, Horace brings such heartbreaking passion to his misbegotten quest that we respond like crazed fans at ringside, though we aren't rooting as much for Horace to become a boxing champion as we are for him to somehow find the authentic self he seeks. That's what Vlautin does to us; he strips away our defenses with close-to-the bone prose that leaves us utterly exposed to the tragedy of being alive--and every bit as thankful for those moments of aching humanity before the curtain falls. --Bill Ott
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
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Ott, Bill. "Don't Skip Out on Me." Booklist, vol. 114, no. 7, 1 Dec. 2017, p. 25. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A519036174/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7f4c3ab9. Accessed 12 July 2024.
THE FREE
By Willy Vlautin
297 pp. Harper Perennial. Paper, $14.99.
Fiction depicting the lives of working- class Americans has a long tradition. Its practitioners -- John Steinbeck, Raymond Carver, Tillie Olsen and Stewart O'Nan, to name a few -- aim for a frank portrayal of men and women whose freedom is limited by economic and social realities, and whose American dream is elusive at best. These works often bypass overt lyricism in favor of unadorned prose, to create a kind of literary cinma vrit.
But just as there is no objective truth when a camera is turned on a subject, so too is literary realism a tricky practice. Some novels are so wedded to a blunt rendition of reality that they seem, paradoxically, less real than life, which after all is studded with moments of poetry and metaphoric resonance. The challenge for the writer of social realism is to enlist the plastic qualities of fiction to produce something lifelike, in which artifice creates the shimmer of recognition.
In his fourth novel, ''The Free,'' Willy Vlautin demonstrates an impressive ability to navigate this challenge. Seamlessly structured like a fugue -- Vlautin is an alt-country singer and songwriter as well as a novelist -- ''The Free'' tells the story of hard-luck characters whose worlds collide when a brain-damaged Iraq war veteran tries to kill himself. He winds up in the hospital instead, under the steadfast attention of a nurse with troubles of her own. (Among other things, she takes care of her mentally ill father despite his constant abuse.) Vlautin also introduces the night manager at the group home where the veteran lives, and a young runaway named Jo. Each is engaged in a quiet struggle against daunting but everyday odds: the human costs of war, the inequities of health care, the crush of debt, the subtle ravages of loneliness.
When Jo arrives at the same hospital as the veteran, with an infection resulting from drug use, the nurse becomes emotionally invested in her predicament. Meanwhile, the night manager stops by to visit his unconscious resident, and we learn his life is no easier: His ex-wife has taken their children while he works two jobs to meet medical bills and keep a family home. (Vlautin may be an alt-country musician, but as a novelist he can be pure country.)
These characters face their burdens with unwavering dignity, and Vlautin's affection for them is evident at every turn. With straightforward economy, he draws us into their seemingly intractable problems, revealing their persistence and decency. In the novel's one surreal gesture, Vlautin dramatizes the veteran's dystopian nightmares, about a militarized world where a vigilante group called the Free brutalizes and murders citizens who do not serve.
For the most part, Vlautin's unadorned narrative is affecting; these unassuming characters bore into us in surprising ways. When Jo insists she will remain with her addict friends because ''they're the only people I know,'' her plain truth is a harrowing reminder of all the ways in which people become trapped. At times, however, Vlautin's refusal to let the characters react with anything but plain-spoken equanimity begins to feel like idealism, and it has the effect of flattening the narrative. Interestingly, the veteran's bizarre nightmares -- and our understanding of what they convey about the dark heart of society -- do as much to suggest the reality Vlautin has set out to capture.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: Willy Vlautin (PHOTOGRAPH BY DAN ECCLES)
By MARISA SILVER
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Silver, Marisa. "The Walls Are Closing In." The New York Times Book Review, 23 Mar. 2014, p. 21(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A362414751/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=98f364fa. Accessed 12 July 2024.
The Free
Willy Vlautin Faber & Faber, 288p, [pounds sterling]12.99
Carthage
Joyce Carol Oates
Fourth Estate, 400pp, [pounds sterling]14.99
It is a peculiarity of the current wars that some of the best novels dealing with Iraq and Afghanistan have been written by non-veterans. Ben Fountain, Lea Carpenter and Roxana Robinson have all charted new territory in examining our recent conflicts. Perhaps this shouldn't be so surprising. Stephen Crane didn't serve in the American civil war. Thomas Pynchon didn't serve in the Second World War. Homer doesn't even seem to have known how Greek military units fought during the Bronze Age.
Now two more novels join the fray: Willy Vlautin's The Free and Joyce Carol Oates's Carthage. Though neither story takes place primarily overseas, both pivot around physically and psychologically damaged veterans.
Vlautin's novel starts from the perspective of Leroy Kervin, a National Guardsman who was blown up by a roadside bomb in Iraq, six months in to his deployment. Kervin has a traumatic brain injury. Having lived in a daze in a group home for the past seven years, he wakes up one day and experiences a striking moment of mental clarity. Terrified it won't last, he attempts suicide.
The novel moves to the stories of Pauline, the nurse who ends up caring for Kervin, and Freddie McCall, the night man who was on duty during Kervin's attempted suicide. Their lives are hard and lonely. Their struggles are interspersed with pieces from an odd, violent and overlong sci-fi dream that Kervin is having while in the hospital.
The dream sections, which deal with Kervin's military service, are the weakest parts of the novel. Thankfully, they are more than offset by scenes showcasing Vlautin's careful attention to how people negotiate their way through sometimes bitterly hard choices. Where The Free shines is in small, delicately rendered moments of kindness or connection--a nurse slowly trying to break through the self-loathing hopelessness of a young heroin addict, a father carefully explaining to his daughters that their mother loves them even though she has abandoned them, the wife of a convict sharing a bit of food with another visitor outside a prison.
Vlautin's characters are, at heart, good people trying to navigate the world in extremely trying circumstances. Their outlook comes not from avoiding unpleasant realities but from confronting them and making the best moral choices possible. The book achieves a kind of beauty--not in spite of the harsh subject matter, but because of the intelligence and moral purpose with which Vlautin approaches it.
The characters in Joyce Carol Oates's Carthage, however, are a different breed. The novel deals with the disappearance of Cressida Mayfield, a 19-year-old college freshman last seen in the company of Brett Kincaid, a disabled Iraq war veteran with visible scars who had previously been engaged to Cressida's beautiful elder sister. Suspicion falls on Brett and the mystery plot unfolds in a series of unexpected twists and turns.
Faced with the unthinkable, Oates's characters soothe themselves with narratives they would like to believe in. Cressida's father tells himself: "If he persevered, if he did not despair, he would find her." Her mother has decided that the continued failure to find Cressida's corpse is "a mercy" and later she constructs a narrative of Christian forgiveness around Brett. While in Iraq, Brett thinks to himself, "I am a good person, I will be spared." All the while, Oates manipulates the plot to put these delusions in a deeply ironic light.
On Brett's return from Iraq, his fiancee interprets events for him without making any serious attempt to engage with his experience: "If people are looking at you in Carthage it is only because they know of you--your medals, your honors. They are admiring of you." It grows increasingly suffocating. Brett remains silent, the weight of expectations crushing his individuality. With impressive emotional sophistication, Oates shows us the way in which civilians, when they want to interact with veterans, often want them to function more as symbols of patriotism or masculinity than as human beings. And she shows how the soldier's refusal to talk, or to dispel those myths, can deepen the problem.
If only that level of insight had been sustained throughout the novel. Oates has a frustrating tendency to bring her ideological opponents onstage only to turn them into simplistic fools or villains. In Carthage, military units are comprised mainly of sociopaths - one unit mutilates dead Iraqis to take war trophies, commits a rape and murder and has a colonel whose stated philosophy is, in caps: "KILL THEM ALL AND LET GOD SORT THEM OUT." Soldiers are described as uncritical followers ("An army is ants. Essentially"). Their orders ultimately emanate from "the militant Christian God" and they are told by their chaplain they are on a "crusade to save Christianity".
As a veteran, I have encountered less aggressive versions of this weird stereotype before, generally from people with extremely limited contact with those who have served. Veterans could explain to Oates (and Vlautin) that one of the defining features of modern warfare is the way that critical decision-making responsibilities get placed on even low-ranking soldiers. This novel exudes a mixture of contempt and ignorance, sometimes leavened with condescending pity ("The war would be fought by an American underclass").
At the very least, Carthage serves as a shining example of the size of the civilian-military divide. Does this matter? Oates's main concern here is not Iraq. The war is a backdrop for philosophical questions--the relationships between guilt and responsibility, belief and fact--in the same way as Shakespeare used the Trojan war in Troilus and Cressida, to which Carthage refers directly. Shakespeare, however, made his military men complex.
It is as if Americans think the relative ignorance that even a serious public intellectual such as Joyce Carol Oates displays about her military is unrelated to her country's inability to form a coherent war policy. It is not.
* Phil Klay served in Iraq with the US marine corps. His short story collection "Redeployment" will be published by Canongate on 27 March
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
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Klay, Phil. "Army dreamers." New Statesman, vol. 143, no. 5201, 14 Mar. 2014, pp. 54+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A365111865/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0b1566f6. Accessed 12 July 2024.
The Free. By Willy Vlautin. Feb. 2014. 320p. HarperPerennial, paper, $14.99 (9780062276742).
There are a number of musician-novelists turning out fine work in both fields, but singer-songwriter Vlautin (he performs with the band Richmond Fontaine) is clearly at the head of this multitalented group. From The Motel Life (2007) through Leon on Pete (2010), he has chronicled, in unsparing, unsentimental prose, the lives of bighearted working-class folk on the wrong side of the economic spectrum. His fourth novel returns to the same terrain, but the ante is upped a notch here as he focuses on the lives of three people in small-town Washington State who face insurmountable obstacles but do so with remarkable grace under pressure. Leroy Kervin is a severely injured veteran of the Iraq War, confined to a nursing home, who lives in an alternate world that is every bit as dystopian as real life; Pauline Hawkins is a single woman who works as a caregiver in the home where Leroy lives and who attempts to save another patient, a heroin-addicted teen in danger from abscesses caused by dirty needles; Freddie McCall, the night man at Leroy's group home, works two jobs but is slowly, inevitably losing everything in his effort to support his daughters, living in Nevada with their mother. At times, reading the heartbreaking, interlocking stories of these circumstance-ravaged souls can almost seem unbearable, but just when you're ready to put the book down in despair, Vlautin delivers a moment of not hope exactly but unvarnished, aching humanity that takes your breath away. There are no winners here--and certainly no conventional happy endings (only an occasional, fleeting break in the cloud cover) but, most important, and this is Vlautin's point, there are no losers, either.--Bill Ott
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 American Library Association
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Ott, Bill. "The Free." Booklist, vol. 110, no. 12, 15 Feb. 2014, p. 24. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A360473581/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d1eabbd3. Accessed 12 July 2024.
Vlautin, Willy THE FREE Perennial/HarperCollins (Adult Fiction) $14.99 2, 4 ISBN: 978-0-06-227674-2
Vlautin's fourth novel (Lean on Pete, 2010, etc.), about damaged people caring for each other across a spectrum of society. Vlautin creates a community of survivors through a handful of well-wrought characters, each linked to the others through the attempted suicide by Leroy Kervin, a disabled Iraq war veteran who seizes a moment of clarity to escape his irreparable life. Freddie is a night caretaker at the group home where Leroy lives with his fear while fighting desperation at not being able to support his family. At the hospital, Pauline nurses him and another new patient, Jo, a runaway from a harsh world beyond her comprehension. The broken, the poor and the desperate fill this book--with dignity. Each one cares for another with grace and humility. Set in motion by Leroy's deliberate plunge down the stairs onto a wooden stake, the book examines the characters' individual humanness, peculiarly American in spirit. This is a story of our times--about the lack of work, the cost of health insurance, the demonizing of war and the damage to life in the working class. At first odd and magical, the narrative becomes more violent and hate-filled. "The Free" of the novel's title appear in a Cormac McCarthy-like vision of a demonic wasteland. Vlautin writes cleanly, beautifully about the people who hang on despite odds. This is a fine novel, grim but bounded by courage and kindliness.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Vlautin, Willy: THE FREE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2013. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A348856369/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ef5d7e63. Accessed 12 July 2024.
The Horse by Willy Vlautin review – man and beast in harmony
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A musician’s chance encounter with a half-blind nag makes him take stock of his shattered life in the author and songwriter’s latest succinct but compelling novel
Killian Fox
Killian Fox
Tue 21 May 2024 04.00 EDT
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There is something quietly glorious about a novelist who identifies a furrow for their writing and then ploughs it diligently and skilfully from one novel to the next, with little concern for reinvention. For Willy Vlautin, that furrow is working-class life in the American west, burdened by debt, alcoholism and depression but enlivened, often, by music, friendship and connection to nature. Many of the elements that colour his earlier novels – motels, casinos, runaways and drifters – recur prominently in this latest, not least the horse of the title, which could be a relative of the long-suffering nag from 2010’s Lean on Pete.
First, though, we meet Al Ward, a 65-year-old musician, “bone-thin, with grey hair and blue eyes”, who is hiding out at a disused mine in the high desert of central Nevada with only his songs and memories for company. Ward is the future self that many young musicians dread becoming: booze-wracked and jaded but still plagued by the compulsion to turn everything into lyrics. (Vlautin, a songwriter himself with the bands Richmond Fontaine and the Delines, knows something of this compulsion.) Ward’s career has been spent penning folk songs with titles such as The Only Way I Know Is Down and The Girl With Drowning Eyes, and as he shuffles about his isolated shack we catch glimpses of the life that inspired such sorrowful compositions.
The dialogue is sturdy and the milieu in which Ward’s career unfolds is richly conjured
Then one morning a horse appears in the snow outside, battered and half-blind, and Ward is forced to reckon with something other than the broken dreams and dysfunctional relationships of his past. He does his limited best to help the creature, offering it spaghetti and driving off coyotes, all the while hoping that the unfortunate beast will depart of its own accord.
It’s easy to conclude that the horse is a mirror of sorts in which Ward can confront the ruins of his own life. Vlautin has his protagonist reach the same conclusion – that “he and the horse were the same… His mind had finally betrayed him by bringing him the saddest thing he could imagine… so Al would go mad and in that madness he’d be set free.”
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It sounds bleak, and it is, but The Horse, weighing in at little more than 200 pages, is also lithe and, for all its jumping around in time, tremendously compelling. Vlautin’s characters are briskly sketched, with the risk that all the ex-bandmates and former lovers begin to blur together, but the dialogue is sturdy and the milieu in which Ward’s career unfolds – the truck-stop lounges, the seedy motels – is richly conjured. Few fans will resent Vlautin for picking over this terrain once more. The Horse is as succinct and wrenching as a well-honed folk song.
The Horse by Willy Vlautin is published by Faber (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply