The Free by Willy Vlautin

The worst of fame is that it insulates you from criticism, nothing fails like success.. Editors are after all only Eng.Lit. majors and by definition inept, addled by theory flaneurs whose job it is to keep the gravy flowing. Nobody said to Vlautin ‘the dream sequence is detachable, anything detachable falls off in the end; please streamline. My gude wife who is an English and Philosophy major, what conversazione, said as much- no theory in her time. She skipped and in a short novel you should not be skipping any more than in a short story. It’s sociological as well with a lot of informational dialogue which he normally does well but here seems laden with 'previously’. The Free as in ‘The Land of’, is not going to be a good news story, America as a dystopian present as charming as nail fungus. Safety nets tend to be large mesh. Freddie ‘two job man’ and Nurse Pauline caregiving and not getting much are the poles of this story. Leroy the brain damaged Iraq vet in a coma from a suicide attempt is the link between them. Freddie is the caretaker and night watch at the home where Leroy was resident. By day he works at the paint store, his house which once was paid for is now double mortgaged to pay the medical bills for his daughter who lives with his wife. There are no intact marriages, nobody eats health food, late model cars are a rumour, are there any donuts left?

Look, it’s still better than Donna Tart. Maybe he should give up the band and work at the day job.

Lean on Pete by Willy Vlautin

I read Willy Vlautin’s Lean on Pete recently. It’s well written and has some of the same qualities of The Motel Life though not quite as realized in terms of inscape which was Hopkins’ term for that mysterious quality of perception that allows us to enter into the heart of things. Narration is a gift that Vlautin has. He’s a musician in a band as well and one can imagine in the bus the paused hush as he begins a story which will be not overcooked and not overchewed. They are brisk and I think probably depend on those stock images which we have of American life, the trailer park, the tract house, the degraded environment of the inner city. There is no need to describe, no need to pause, a visual library gives us all we need to know. To continue the metaphor to the point of collapse those images have a million date stamps on them and are beginning to fall apart.

It’s not so much the detail as the telling detail. Dickens’s readers all knew about slums and had read many a tract about dens of vice and corruption. Tom-all-Alone’s as a terminus has its own special stink:

Jo lives—that is to say, Jo has not yet died—in a ruinous place known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone's. It is a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people, where the crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants who after establishing their own possession took to letting them out in lodgings. Now, these tumbling tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery. As on the ruined human wretch vermin parasites appear, so these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever and sowing more evil in its every footprint than Lord Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle, and the Duke of Foodle, and all the fine gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set right in five hundred years—though born expressly to do it.

(Bleak House)

They’re going to make a movie out of Lean on Pete. It will be o.k. because it’s going back to being a movie but sometimes more is more.

The Motel Life by Willy Vlautin

Vlautin sends his tale hopping across the lake of the imagination reaching its high point with the first hop and following with a series of skips. In the end it sinks into the general water and life closes over it. When the novel was over I didn’t want to know any more, a perfectly coherent world was revealed and that is surely one form of truth. Taking that away is a solid feeling because so many novels are no more than a used tissue of lies.

The Motel Life published in 2006 was the debut novel of Will Vlautin and it is told by Frank Flannagan of Reno a place of gritty despair that he renders well. You have only to think of the mephitic exhalation of the average betting shop expanded to city size. He and his older brother Jerry Lee have been living in motels around the city since their mother died some 6 years previously when Frank was 15 and Jerry Lee a couple of years older. Daddy was a gambling man and having been found out in fraud at his work was sent to jail. On coming out he stayed with the family for a while and then just left and was never seen again. He’s barely the presence of an absence for his sons.

They have dropped out of school and are already hard drinkers working at casual jobs. Frank is a fabulist or to put it in plain English he makes up things to tell his brother. Jerry Lee draws, the comic book drawings in the book are by him. For both of them their art is at least one good place that they can withdraw to. Frank has been put on to this strategy by a car dealer called Earl Hurley that he washed cars for just after his mother died. Earl has noticed him standing in a state of pure blank misery for 10 minutes. He says:

Seems like you’re a pretty tough kid. Look, here’s a piece of advice. I don’t know if it’s any good or not for you, you’re the only one who’ll know if it is. What you got to do is think about the life you want, think about it in your head. Make it a place where you want to be: a ranch, a beach house, a penthouse on the top of a skyscraper. It doesn’t matter what it is, but a place that you can hide out in. When things get rough, go there. And if you find a place and its quits working, just change it. Change it depending on the situation, depending on your mood. Look at it this way, it’ll be like your good luck charm. Make up a place that’s good, that gives you strength, that no one can take away. Then when everybody’s on your ass, or you can’t stop thinking about your mom, you can go there.
‘Okay,' I said.
‘Does that make sense?'
‘I think so, I said. ‘Could it help my brother Jerry Lee?'

The big hop that sets up the story as a whole is Jerry Lee’s accidental killing of a kid who is riding a bike in the early morning in a snow storm. It’s the fault of the cyclist but Jerry has been drinking and so he panics and thinking that he ought to bring the body to a hospital even though he’s obviously dead loads him in the car. Jerry Lee is in his underwear when he calls on Frank because his girlfriend has set fire to his pants so turning up at a police station with this story is probably going to be the start of a long spell of durance vile. They decide to leave the body at the entrance to the hospital and then take off somewhere with a ‘tank full of gas’ that deep rutted escape cliche. The gravitational pull of Reno is too strong and variously and separately they come back. Once back Jerry Lee falls into a depression and afraid to die but seeking some sort of symbolic karmic balance or recompense shoots himself in the thigh of his crippled leg. Details like this are not highlighted with an authorial nudge. It’s Frank’s tale and it’s not the good space the Earl has recommended and will likely contain fanciful elements, American grand guignol that jollies us, the readers of this fiction. Interspersed in the narrative are stories, a farrago of truth and lies, that Frank tells Jerry Lee and others.

This is a short novel that you could read while you were on the Greyhound bus on the run to make a new life. It’s 206 pages long, don’t take more. Read it, it’s great.