Meet Willy Vlautin
WILLY VLAUTIN began playing guitar and writing songs as a teenager. It was a Paul Kelly song based on Raymond Carver’s Too Much Water So Close to Home that inspired him to start writing stories. He is the author of three well-received novels: The Motel Life, which has been made into a movie starring Dakota Fanning, Emile Hersh, and Stephen Dorff; Northline; and Lean on Pete, which won two Oregon Book Awards. He is a founding member of the internationally acclaimed alternative country band Richmond Fontaine, which has produced nine studio albums to date. Originally from Reno, Nevada, Vlautin now lives in Scappoose, Oregon.
A Conversation with Willy Vlautin
What kind of extra-literary and extra-musical jobs have you held—anything dangerous or notably mundane?
I’ve had a long series of jobs like anyone else I guess. But my first real job was at a chemical company where I loaded trucks and answered phones. After that it was mostly warehouse jobs and trucking company jobs. I did that for maybe thirteen years. I really grew to hate warehouses and even now when I drive past them I get depressed as hell. After that I became a house painter. I’d always hated house painters, and suddenly there I was one. I did it for years and eventually grew to like it all right, but Jesus, I hope I don’t have to go back anytime soon.
You somewhere expressed a fondness for John Fante and Charles Bukowski. When did you first stumble on their fiction?
I found out about John Fante later in life. A friend of mine gave me Ask the Dust and I plowed through it and then all his others. I think he’s a great writer. Bukowski, on the other hand, I read in college. I didn’t do much in college but hang out in the library, and I read a lot of him there. He’s one of the only things I got out of college. Crazy thing is I was young, and I had no idea about anything but I knew I liked to get drunk, and I knew I thought Bukowski was funnier than hell. I started buying all his books, and let me tell you they’re expensive and you can never find them used. So I had them lined up in my room like a shrine. At the time it was summer, and I was working for my mom. I was helping park planes during the Reno Air Races. I was hungover and sweating to death ’cause it was so hot and it was there I had this revelation: Maybe if I got rid of the Bukowski books I wouldn’t be a loser anymore. Maybe if I sold the books I wouldn’t be sweating to death and hungover. Maybe I’d have more confidence and be more normal. Maybe I’d amount to something. It had to be Bukowski’s influence that was ruining me. So I went down and sold all his books and I thought I’d straighten up and fly right, but then I had almost fifty bucks in my pocket and well. . . .
Your band, Richmond Fontaine, formed over ten years ago. But what came first, Willy the writer or Willy the rocker?
I wrote stories for myself in high school, but I never thought much of it. I wasn’t a very good student and had a hard time in English and just assumed that I wasn’t smart enough to be a writer. So I really gravitated toward music because anyone can join a band, and I loved records, records were my best friends growing up. So I started playing guitar when I was fourteen. I wrote story songs and more than anything I wanted to make a real record and have it be in a store. Have it sitting there next to all the great records of the world. So from when I was a kid up until I was thirty-five or so I just wrote novels and stories for myself. I’d just finish one and throw it in the closet and start another one.
An AllMusic.com review of your album Miles From, admired “the quality of Willy Vlautin’s songwriting; suggesting the clean narrative lines and morally troubling perspective of Raymond Carver, Vlautin’s tales of damaged lives and lost souls are vivid, honest, and evoke both horror and compassion in equal measures. . . .” Do you get that a lot—the Carver comparison?
I started writing seriously when I first read Raymond Carver. He changed my life. There is an Australian songwriter named Paul Kelly who wrote a song based on the Carver story “So Much Water So Close to Home.” I liked the story of the song so much I went down and found the Carver book, and I swear Carver just killed me. I was living in my girlfriend’s parents’ garage at the time, and I spent all my free time beating myself up for what a bum I was. And then I read Raymond Carver. I swear I thought I understood every line. He wasn’t better than me, he wasn’t from Harvard, he didn’t get a scholarship to Oxford, he was just a man from the Northwest trying to hang on. I was never adventurous or smart enough to be Hemingway or Steinbeck, and Bukowski lived too hard for me, but Carver was just a working-class guy with an edge that was trying to kill him. Boy, that time was something. I started writing as hard as I could from that moment on. The stories just started pouring out. I had all this sadness and darkness on my back, and I didn’t know what it was. I was just a kid. But Carver opened it all up. So yeah, I’m always grateful to get compared to him. It’s a great honor, and I’ll take it where I can get it. I know I’m just the janitor where guys like Steinbeck and William Kennedy and James Welch and Raymond Carver are the kings, but for me just trying to be a part of it is enough.
About the book
For the Patron Saint of Nurses
FOR YEARS I HAVE WANTED to write a novel about nursing, but I never had the courage to attempt it. Then one night I stopped in a bar for a drink, and on the TV the news was playing. At the end of the program, after the sports and entertainment updates, there was a very short segment on soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan with severe long-term brain injuries. It was an issue I had followed from the beginning of the two wars, an issue I could never quite stop thinking about. There was a birthday party going on in the back of the bar, and a couple arguing across from me. No one was watching the story on TV. No one I knew ever talked about the wars, and it was rarely reported about in any significant way by our local newspaper. The segment was over in two minutes, but I knew that the injured and their families would struggle and suffer for the rest of their lives.
Earlier that afternoon I had stopped by a paint store I had gone to daily for ten years when I was a house painter. One of the clerks I hadn’t seen in a long while confided to me that his infant son had been born with severe medical issues. His insurance policy covered only half of the hospital bills, and he was going broke trying to keep up.
In my own life, my girlfriend was denied health insurance due to a short list of preexisting conditions so minor we barely considered them to be ailments. There were no physicals or meetings or phone conversations with doctors. Their refusals were by form letter. She was perfectly healthy yet without insurance, and there was nothing we could do about it.
It was that night and those three things that made me finally sit down to start this novel. The Free is my distress call to the Patron Saint of Nurses in hopes that he will take notice. I’ve always read about and followed the saints. I believe in saints. Camillus De Lellis is the protector of the sick and the nurses who care for them. He was a soldier, a drunk, a gambleholic, a patient, and then a nurse, a priest, and finally a saint. I wrote this for him in hopes that he would remember to look after people like Leroy, Freddie, Pauline, Darla, and Carol.
Read on
Have You Read? More by Willy Vlautin
THE MOTEL LIFE
With “echoes of Of Mice and Men” (The Bookseller, London) The Motel Life explores the frustrations and failed dreams of two Nevada brothers—on the run after a hit-and-run accident—who, forgotten by society, and short on luck and hope, desperately cling to the edge of modern life.
“An unapologetic ode to self-defeat. . . . Its charm is unassuming . . . at times its appeal is irresistible. . . . Slighter than Carver, less puerile than Bukowski, Vlautin nevertheless manages to lay claim to the same bleary-eyed territory, and surprisingly—perhaps even unintentionally— to make it new.”
—New York Times Book Review
(Editor’s Choice)
“A debut road-trip novel that echoes the spare, bleak style of such writers as Denis Johnson and Raymond Carver. . . . The author conveys the pain and desolate lives of his characters without a
hint of melodrama. . . . Anyone who enjoys the story will wish that it went on longer.”
—Washington Post
“At any given time there is, somewhere in American fiction, a man sitting in a bar, stone broke, and drinking whiskey and beer, and wondering whether to turn up for work or just high-tail out of town. He’s there in Bukowski, in Denis Johnson, and in newcomers like Matthew McIntosh. He’s there too in this debut novel by Willy Vlautin.”
—The Independent (London)
An Excerpt
We emptied both our accounts but I had only $234 in savings, and Jerry Lee had less than a hundred. While we were in line I kept thinking about the kid. Maybe he had been sleeping in the warm bed of his girlfriend an hour before he died. He might have snuck out her window when he knew he had to leave. Might have been laying there next to her, and she was naked and he’s about to fall asleep; maybe it was then that he made himself get up and get dressed. Maybe he heard her mom get up and use the toilet. Maybe he kissed her before he left. Maybe he got back in bed with her one last time before he made himself go for sure. I hope it was like that, and not the other way. That he was running from something, or that he had nowhere to go, or that he couldn’t go home ’cause things were so bad there.
Bad luck, it falls on people every day. It’s one of the only certain truths. It’s always on deck, it’s always just waiting. The worst thing, the thing that scares me the most is that you never know who or when it’s going to hit. But I knew then, that morning, when I saw the kid’s frozen arms in the back of the car that bad luck had found my brother and me. And us, we took the bad luck and strapped it around our feet like concrete. We did the worst imaginable thing you could do. We ran away. We just got in his beat-up 1974 Dodge Fury and left.
NORTHLINE
Fleeing Las Vegas and her abusive boyfriend, Allison Johnson moves to Reno, intent on making a new life for herself. Haunted by mistakes of her past, and lacking any self-belief, her only comfort seems to come from the imaginary conversations she has with Paul Newman, and the characters he played. But as life crawls on, and she finds work, small acts of kindness start to reveal themselves to her, and slowly the chance of a new life begins to emerge.
“Northline shines with naked honesty and unsentimental humanity. The character of Allison Johnson, and the wounded-but-still-walking people she encounters on her journey will stay with me for a long while. Vlautin has written the American novel that I’ve been hoping to find.”
—George Pelecanos
“When a work of pure fiction comes along that reads like the best that journalism has to offer, it brings with it a sense of hope. . . . Willy Vlautin’s second novel, Northline, is just such a book. Quiet, sad, and suffused with a melancholic serenity, it begs to be read, if for no other reason than it seems true.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Willy Vlautin tells [Allison Johnson’s] story with unrelenting clarity. . . . Northline serves as a reminder that America’s beaten, broke, and miserable are not necessarily morally bankrupt or clueless victims. They’re just trying to get by on minimal resources, little education and a bit of hope.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Northline recalls a dust-jacket blurb on an early edition of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men: ‘Two hours to read, twenty years to forget.’ ”
—Booklist
An Excerpt
Her thoughts began to race as she thought of her uncertain future. Her anxieties started again. Her breaths quickened and her body tensed. She pinched her leg as hard as she could, hoping that would stop it. She closed her eyes and thought of Paul Newman. She focused on his face and his blue eyes. “So, kid, how’s the water?”“At least the water heater’s good,” she said.
“This place ain’t much, but I think you’ll do all right.” He was sitting beside her on the toilet, drinking beer.
“You sure do like Budweiser.”
“It’s the king of beers.”
“I’m a terrible person. I don’t know why you ever talk to me.”
“We all have tough times. Remember me in The Verdict. I was drunk as a bum for more than twenty years in that one.”
“But you were a lawyer, you’d gone to college.”
“Listen, kid, you could go to college. Believe me, you’re smart enough.”
“You think so?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“I’ve done some horrible things.”
“We all have. You ever seen Hud?”
“You sure were an asshole in that one.”
“I’ve been bad. You aren’t bad. You just got what I’d call bad nerves. That, my girl, you’re gonna have to work on. We got to toughen you up. That’s why you’re in the boat you’re in.”
“I just wish we could disappear together.”
“We do all the time.”
“Remember when you were in Hombre? I would have taken care of you in that one. I would have had us sneak away and get a place a thousand miles from anywhere.”
“They sure were rough on me in that one. Indians don’t get many breaks.”
“I wouldn’t have let you go down the hill and get shot. I would have gone down myself.”
“I know you would have, kid. That’s why I’m here.”
“You think he’s gonna be all right? Do you think they’ll be all right to him?”
“I just stopped by this morning. His new dad is a hell of a good guy. That’s something to know. You shouldn’t worry. You did the right thing.”
“What are they like?”
“They stayed up all night worrying about him. They got a hell of a nice house, too. Plus his new mom is the most patient gal in the world. I sure as hell wish I was as good a parent as they’re gonna be.”
“You promise they’re that way?”
“Of course I promise.”
“What are they doing right now?”
“Sleeping, which is what you should be doing.”
“I feel horrible.”
“I’d make you breakfast if I could. I can cook like a son of a bitch. I know how to make a breakfast that’ll cure any hangover.”
“I really like your spaghetti sauce.”
“That’s just the tip of the iceberg, kid.”
“You know something that doesn’t make sense?”
“What’s that?”
“My sister Evelyn likes Robert Redford better in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I can’t believe she’d say something like that.”
“She’s just a kid, what do you expect?”
“You won’t leave me, will you?”
“Look, if I wasn’t so old I’d jump right in there with you. You’re a hell of a catch.”
“I bet.”
“You are. I told old Bob Redford about you, and he’s jealous as hell.”
“You’re the only one I like.”
“I know, kid. You’re a real gem that way. Now get out of the tub, it’s time to give it another try.”
“All right,” she said.
“And kid—”
“Yeah?”
“Buy a TV, you think too much.”
LEAN ON PETE
Told from the perspective of fifteen-year-old Charley Thompson, Lean on Pete is the story of a boy left to fend for himself by his wayward single father. Charley wanders to Portland Meadows racetrack one day and finds work with a surly, washed-up horse trainer. He befriends an aging quarter horse named Lean on Pete, and before long, Charley and Pete find themselves alone in an unforgiving landscape scattered with a vivid cast of characters, desperate situations, and glimmers of hope.
“Reading Willy Vlautin is like jumping into a clear, cold lake in the middle of summer. His prose is beautifully spare and clean, but underneath the surface lies an incredible depth, with all kinds of hidden stories and emotions resting in the shadows.”
—Hannah Tinti
“Willy Vlautin’s novels are clean as a bone, companionable, and profound. He is a master at paring lon
eliness and longing from his characters, issuing them through downturns, trials and transience without starving their humanity, and always sustaining them, and the reader, with ordinary hope.”
—Sarah Hall
“The writing is spare and straightforward. . . . There is intensity in Vlautin’s narration, and also beauty and power. . . . Vlautin’s major accomplishment lies in posing a damning question: How could we, as a society, have allowed this to happen?”
—Seattle Times
An Excerpt
My dad and I had just moved to Portland, Oregon, and we’d been there for a week. We didn’t know anybody. Two days before my school year was done we packed the truck and moved out from Spokane. We brought our kitchen table and four chairs, dishes and pots and pans, our clothes and TV, and my dad’s bed. We left all the rest.
Neither of us had been to Portland before. My dad just knew a guy who told him of a job opening as a forklift driver for Willig Freight Lines. He applied for it and got it. They interviewed him on the phone and gave him the job right then because at the time he was a forklift driver for TNT Freight Lines in Rock Springs and he’d done that sort of work for years. We lived in a motel for a few days, then he rented us a house a mile from where he worked. I’m not sure why he wanted to leave Spokane. I told him I didn’t want to go, I begged him that I didn’t want to go, but he said he’d rather go to prison and get the shit kicked out of him every day than spend any more time in a dump like Spokane.
The house we rented had two bedrooms. There was a kitchen with an electric stove and a fridge, and there was another room that was empty except for a TV we set on a chair. There was a bathroom that had a tub, sink, and toilet, and there was a back room where you could store things and where there was plumbing and electricity so you could put in a washer and dryer if you had them.
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