Willy Vlautin: The Motel Life

[beer good]

The Motel Life, Willy Vlautin

Q: You know what happens when you play a country song backwards?
A: You get your house back, you get your girl back, and your dog comes back to life.

The two brothers Frank and Jerry Lee Flannigan are losers in every sense of the word. They lost their parents when they were young, they've lost their chances at making something of themselves, they lost their house, Frank lost his girlfriend and Jerry Lee lost his leg; now they're stuck in Reno, surviving from day to day in any way they can, drinking far too much and hanging onto their dreams not because they have any illusions about them coming true anymore but just because it seems to be all that's left. Until Jerry Lee bursts into Frank's room one night, inconsolable, and tells him he got behind the wheel after one drink too many, ran over a kid and now he doesn't know what to do. And all the things in their lives that have remained at a shaky status quo for years suddenly get put to the test.

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.

Vlautin's debut novel has a fantastic sense of... presence. He plants his reader right in the narrator Frank's head as he tries to save his brother and himself, in a succinct but incredibly descriptive prose. You could make much of the similarities to American storytellers like Carver, Denis Johnson or Yates, and the dustjacket does, repeatedly; but at the same time, Vlautin is a musician as well and The Motel Life reminds me of nothing so much as some song Tom Waits should have written - perhaps "Burma Shave", the story of a young girl who hitches a ride with Elvis Presley's ghost and ends up dead in a ditch to the tune of "Summertime", or "Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis", or "9th and Hennepin"... it's all dingy bars, used car lots and empty whiskey bottles, but also a set of characters that for all their fucked-up lives never come across as clichéd white trash jokes. Vlautin genuinely loves his losers and wants them to make it even though both he and his readers know they probably won't, and there is something beautiful in all of them. Jerry Lee draws every part of his life in black and white, and Frank keeps telling elaborate stories that all seem like fictional variations on his own life and dreams; anything to stay alive.

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 it quits working, just change it. (...) Hope is the key. You can make shit up, there's no law against that. Make up some place you and your brother can go if you want. It might not work, but it might. Ain't too hard to try.

And it does work, if not always for Frank then at least for Vlautin. Sure, there's a few points where you wonder just how much more he is going to put his characters through the wringer, but he always stays on just the right side of melodrama... after all, what is a good country song but a series of just slightly exaggerated everyday stories set to music that tugs at something in your chest? Willy Vlautin knows how to make a typewriter sound like a weeping pedal steel guitar, I just got to know Frank and Jerry Lee better than I might have wanted to, and it breaks my fucking heart. .

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I mentioned that Vlautin is a musician, right? His band is called Richmond Fontaine; here's a couple of youtube links:
Incident At Conklin Creek
Capsized
$87 And A Guilty Conscience
Post To Wire

 

[beer good]

Vlautin's second novel Northline is still a very worthwhile book (no less so since it comes with its own soundtrack, essentially an instrumental Richmond Fontaine album with some Wilco-like electronic overtones), but it doesn't work quite as well as Motel Life.

I think part of it is the set-up. Whereas The Motel Life was a story of two people and the dynamic between them, this is a story of just one woman - Allison, referred to throughout as "the girl" although she's in her 20s - who, after getting beat up by her nazi (no, actual nazi) boyfriend once too often runs away to Reno, where she tries to piece her life back together. The problem, of course, being that she's never had much of a life to start with. And as well-written as her... I don't want to say descent into, but rather failure at an ascent from crushing depression, despair and drunkenness is, it all gets a little bit too static. There's a reason many of the best country songs are duets.

That said, the book is only 190 pages so that doesn't bother me too much, and Vlautin still has that Townes Van Zandt-like quality in his writing: to take a tired old story in a tired old idiom and add a realistic dimension and sense of urgency that gives it extra nerve, hooked straight into your heartstrings. In a way it's post-modern country music as a novel - adding texture not by describing the diners and the truck stops and the bottles in detail, but by dropping just enough keywords to hook into the images passed down by a hundred songs and films and novels that came before. The meetings between various people down at the bottom are still excellent in the way he gives everyone a fair chance to be heard (at least more than their lives have given them), and he has the guts to end the book on a bleak note. It may lack the joy (if that's the word) of storytelling that Motel Life had, but it's still a fine novel. And I'm really looking forward to film version too; it's made by the woman who made Frozen River, and she and Vlautin seem to have a lot in common - maybe that will be the duet this needed to be?

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