I've been a sort-of fan of Willy Vlautin's band, Richmond Fontaine, since moving to Portland, though I've never really paid attention to the lyrics in his alt-countryish narrative tunes. Part of the problem is Vlautin's singing voice, which is raspy and weary in that whiskey-soaked kind of way that usually appeals to me, but is also oddly bland, with little differentiation in range or tone from track to track. His music just kind of washes over me. It's pleasant enough to listen to but hardly memorable, and I can't focus on it long enough to absorb lyrical content.Which is probably why I resisted reading Vlautin's novel, The Motel Life for years following its release. Based on his music, I just didn't think the guy had it in him to sustain my interest for a book's worth of pages. Recently, though, I've been trying to write fiction myself, and so my interest in local writers has been reinvigorated. I picked up Motel Life at Powell's, started reading it, and within minutes was utterly hooked. Vlautin's prose is deceptively simple, unfettered by big words, but only because its from the point of view of a character, Frank Flannagan, who doesn't use big words. The book's been compared to Bukowski (and Vlautin himself is an enormous fan), but Vlautin's writing is far more interesting than Bukowski's because his characters actually have depth and he tells a story that goes somewhere and has twists and turns that surprise without beating you over the head with their cleverness. I love that the book's main catalyst is a complete accident, as Frank's brother, Jerry Lee, hits a kid on his bike with his car. Neither Jerry Lee nor Frank are bad guys (in fact their inherent sweetness and their love and affection for each other is perhaps the book's strongest element), but they're not the brightest bulbs on the tree either, and their first impulse upon learning of the kid's death is to run.A lesser writer I feel would have Jerry Lee kill someone with his own hands on accident, like in a fight, and then have the two brothers flee across the country, cops in pursuit. Instead Jerry Lee and Frank return to Reno, where Motel Life takes place, and try to keep on living their decrepit lives. Frank gets a dog. They drink a lot. Jerry Lee gets more and more depressed and shoots himself in the leg because he's too chicken-shit to kill himself. Vlautin mixes stories from the brothers' past into the slow-burning narrative with admirable skill. You begin to know them and care about them so much you become interested in seeing them walk to the liquor store, or get drunk on a back porch. Great writing is like life: Reading it, you don't even realize you've grown to love its characters until something befalls them and you feel their pain. Vlautin's writing snuck up on me, and it wasn't until the final pages, when Jerry Lee says, "I want to fall in love and have someone fall in love with me... Do you think that's so wrong to want? I mean, after what's happened?" that I realized how deeply he was getting to me.Then only thing that keeps me from giving this thing five stars is Vlautin's device of Frank telling Jerry Lee stories to cheer him up. Frank's stories-within-the-story are long and convoluted and intentionally random and ridiculous. They're sort of funny I suppose, but paled in comparison to the intense, beautiful power of the book's main narrative, and I found myself getting impatient with them and wanting things to get back to what mattered. The dynamic of Frank telling Jerry Lee stories is important and touching, but Vlautin didn't need to spend pages and pages on each one; it's cruel of him to take us away from the main action for that long. This element and the book's ending, which wrapped up way, way too quickly, keep the book from receiving a perfect score from me. What remains is immensely good though>
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.
Do You like book The Motel Life (2007)?
I bought this novel upon a recommendation of a friend after listening to Vlautin's band Richmond Fontaine and whilst I have never been a big reader, this book alone has kick-started a passion I wish I'd found long ago.The Motel Life is a beautifully, yet simply narrated tale about the ties and bonds that are formed in brotherhood, with a true and honest outlook on life. Written with a great attention to detail, the story follows two brothers on the run as we discover their bleak yet warming pasts, as well as their desires and morals through this heartbreaking tale. Tension is built slowly and it is constructed so magnificently that it escalated to an emotional climax which left me reflecting on my personal relationships with friends and family. The story is written with such brutal sincerity that I became directly attatched to the brothers and could heavily relate to both of their mindsets and actions.I cannot sing this read enough praises and whilst this maybe one of the first books I've ever read in it's entirety, I already have another Vlautin novel on the way to me...
—Matt North
I wanted to like this novel so much, it being about set in two places I lived and know well.But it just could not make it. Also, although I know it's just a character, I had a hard time swallowing the unabashed and unchanged view of the protagonist toward sex workers.It's so short, even though it's supposedly 200 pages, it's almost a novella. (Spacing and type size.) Also, I don't understand why it's in British formatting, but being sold in the US.I'd probably read another book by the author, assuming it was not much longer.All in all, meh. Just meh. A disappointing meh.
—Wheeler
Willie Vlautin has an optimistic view of humanity, which should be weird statement considered how filled with violence, drug and alcohol abuse, sadness, anxiety, grinding poverty, accidents, and injury his books are. But, read him and you find a very fragile but still there humanity to his portraits of the inhabitants of the third world regions of America’s New West. Vlautin is the bandleader of Richmond Fontaine a band in between the Midwest grimness of Uncle Tupelo and the high desert yearn of Calexico with a literary bent provided by Vlautin that earns his band and him comparisons to O’Conner, Johnson, Carver, Steinbeck, McMurty, Jim Thompson and others.
—Adam
