The Motel Life by Willy Vlautin: The good bits
John McCain could learn a thing or two about “straight talk” from reading Willy Vlautin. Vlautin’s The Motel Life is one of the straightest shooting novels I’ve read in many a day. Make that year. So straight it becomes poetic. It’s a tender, sad, funny messy hangover of a book that constantly had me slowing down because I was getting to close to the end. There are some writers you want to read and read again. You anticipate their next books, look for them. bide your time. There are other writers you think of in this way, but even more than that, what you’d really like to do is get drunk with them and have them tell you stories. Willy Vlautin falls in this latter category.
Another guy who could learn a thing or two from Willy is Charles Bock. Both novels come out of the casino littered landscape of Nevada. Bock’s Beautiful Children is borne and bred in Las Vegas. Vlautin’s Flannigan Brothers and their parents, drinking buddies, gambling partners, and girlfriends crash in every motel with a flicker of neon in the environs of Reno. I wanna play some blackjack in Reno. I already know where to eat and crash.
Damn if I’m not gonna have to put this at the very top of my ‘Best Reads So Far’ this year. Ahead even of my very favorite author, J. M. Coetzee. This was a 30-1 shot. This was the triple crown winner getting nipped at the wire. Sure, it wasn’t his (Coetzee’s) best race – but an impressive few furlongs in any case. The litany of motels checked into and out of in this novel, the prodigious number of 6-packs bought and consumed is impressive. You can’t help but love the full throttle sprint to try and stay just ahead of disaster and bad luck.
Here are some random parts of Vlautin’s (too) short episodic novel that I loved:
Frank and his brother (Jerry Lee) have come home from swimming in the river one evening and their mother (who is dying of cancer) has fixed them a special meal, to go along with a heart to heart on their future after she is gone.
‘What’s the occasion?’ I asked.
‘That we’re all sitting here. That I have my two boys, that it’s sunny out, that you two went swimming, that we have steaks.’
It’s a lovely and poignant few pages, and typical of the heart-felt sentiments that never, ever have a whiff of anything but real people expressing real sentiments.
Frank is always telling (or writing) stories for his brother, many about being abducted by aliens. Once, when Frank is sitting in the hospital with the dozing Jerry Lee who has attempted suicide by shooting himself in his half-leg (the rest had been lost in a freight-car hopping accident), he writes him a letter-story. In it, having taken the persona of Dickie Van Buren, he finds himself in the possession of an old woman’s poodle (she has been run over by a bus).
I decided to move to Alaska that night. The last frontier. The last place in America for freedom, for individuality, for honor, for peace. It’s also a great place to raise a dog….
Ten days later I was sitting in a bar in Juneau, Alaska. Some of the weirdest people I’d ever seen in my life live up there. I spent the first week in a motel watching TV and reading Jack London. Got through most of the whole collection. I wanted to study, I really did, but after reading White Fang I knew that the wilderness was no place to live. Have you read that fucking book? You’d have to be nuts to live like that. Out in a cabin with no TV and no heat. And then it dawned on me, I got a fucking poodle, not a husky. I’d need a fucking husky, but then I liked the poodle. I didn’t know what to do.
Nevada’s John McCain has his Straight Talk Express. But WIlly Vlautin has the hard-scrabble denizens of Reno. Many of them offer their philosophies of life. In another one of the stories that he tells Jerry Lee, Frank offers up the story of how their father met their mother – including the story of Iris, the woman he met before their mother. Iris offered this wisdom to their father, Jimmy:
“My mother taught me how to survive in this world. My mother said that each of us is like an M&M in a blender full of ice cream. We all try to avoid getting chopped up. We do most anything to avoid getting sliced, but in the end most of us get the chop and become nothing more than a part of the milk shake. With no difference, no will, all the pressure of the world beating us down, making us like everyone else. But I ain’t giving up. My mother taught me the basic three words: Good handgun knowledge. And believe me, it really does help a girl out.”
In a P.S. Afterword, Vlautin is asked about his “approach to fiction”. Where does he write (he lives now in Portland, Oregon)? At the local race track. This is so right. For anyone who’s spent time at the track (the dog track especially), you have already seen characters right out of Vlautin’s novel. It’s not so much that he’s brought them to life. It’s more that he’s opened up his pages to them and lent an ear.
Bravo! The Motel Life gets my highest, unqualified recommendation – one I never give lightly and generally resist considering various tastes, etc. All that’s out the window with this one. This one is eerily of our times.
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