Willy Vlautin is one of those people who make you wonder how he does it. Now eight novels in, plus 11 studio albums with his first band Richmond Fontaine, and seven with his current project, The Delines. When you consider that he started his professional life as a house painter, how has he found the time?
House painting in Portland, Oregon, provides the milieu for his latest work. Vlautin’s stock-in-trade has always been that large proportion of the US population you rarely see on television or read about in newspapers, usually designated as “the underclass”. They are not the disgruntled Maga mob. They probably don’t vote, as they know it would make little difference to their lives.
Eddie Wilkens (42) runs his own painting business. His wife Marleen having done a flit to Florida, he lives alone. He employs an assorted bunch of oddballs on a casual basis, the frequently absent but always forgiven Houston being the most regular. Then eight-year-old neighbour Russell starts hanging around, offering to clean Eddie’s brushes in the evening. Russell is a refugee from a household that includes his single mother Connie, who works nights in a strip club, and his violent, bullying older half-brother, Curtis. Over time Russell takes up residence at Eddie’s place, with his mother’s consent, and Eddie becomes his de facto guardian.
The novel hangs on Eddie’s fundamental decency and Russell’s resilience. It foregrounds the role of luck in life, but also how acts of compassion and kindness – great and small – are windbreaks people construct against adversity. Eddie and Russell are lucky to find each other. It is a cliche of conventional reviewing to offer the endorsement, “I loved the characters”, but in this case I did. As Vlautin writes in his acknowledgments, “I hated painting but I sure loved hanging out with the painters.”
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Ann Patchett has written: “Vlautin writes about people overlooked by society and overlooked by literature.” True on one count, but not quite on the other: Vlautin’s taut prose and subject matter are in a direct lineage which includes one of his avowed influences, Raymond Carver, and stretches back at least as far as Steinbeck. However, a voice like his was never more needed than at the present time.
Desmond Traynor is a writer and critic. He is working on a book about The Go-Betweens for Bloomsbury’s 33⅓ series
