Willie Vlautin approaches his songwriting and his prose with the same honesty, and his debut novel is drawing comparisons with Raymond Carver. He talks to Keith Duggan.
'Wow, this place is nice," exclaims Willie Vlautin brightly, looking appreciatively at the opulent decor of the Radisson hotel. The Galway hotel is certainly much more plush and rarefied than the Cal Neva, the Shanghri-La, the Sutro, the Fitzgerald, the Sandman and the many other fading, downbeat Reno establishments that feature in Vlautin's debut novel, a sweet and aching story called The Motel Life.
As sometime singer-songwriter for Richmond Fontaine, the moody and romantic purveyors of lonesome Americana, Vlautin has acquired something of a cult following but in his cheerful, unaffected way, he reckons that "the band are going to have to fire me and get a much better songwriter if they want to make a ton of money. It is what it is."
However, the publication of The Motel Life, which has drawn handsome comparisons in style and voice to the work of Vlautin's hero Raymond Carver, has swept the likeable Nevadan man off his feet.
He flew from Oregon to London and on to Galway for what was one of his first solo readings, at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature.
Although he has been writing stories since his teens, Vlautin never once believed he could become a "professional writer".
"I felt you had to be a much better man than I was," he smiles in apology over a cup of coffee."I didn't think I had the intellect. And I had read [ Charles] Bukowski but I was no tough guy who could get into bar fights and quit jobs. I was a total keep-the-head-down-and-try-to-get-out-without-'em-noticing- I-was-alive kind of guy."
Looking remarkably fresh and hopeful for a late thirty-something with a fascination for the bar life, Vlautin lists his job resumé as musician, warehouse attendant, shipping clerk and house painter. "Matter of fact, I just finished up a painting job a couple of months ago."
He moved, in the classic tradition, from job to job and left his boyhood home of Reno for the urbane and terminally hip city of Portland, Oregon to write his strange, melodious songs about episodes of life in Reno - the self-styled Biggest Little City In The World.
Richmond Fontaine's last album was called The Fitzgerald, in honour of the $27-per-night motel that Vlautin likes to stay in when he comes home. His prose is steeled with a disconcertingly pure honesty, like that of a young child. The Motel Life is about two brothers, Frank and Jerry Lee Flannigan, whose day-to-day struggles are thrown into chaos when Jerry Lee accidentally runs a teenage boy down in the middle of a night-time snow blizzard.
Their panicked response is one of the abiding themes of American literature, from Mark Twain to Richard Ford. The boys skip town and try to run away from their trouble.
Racked with remorse over the pointlessness of what happened, the brothers console one another by drinking supermarket six-packs and trading comforting action adventure tales which always end in glorious triumph, light years removed from the low wattage solace of their roadside motels.
"I don't think those stories are so dark but when you sit back you can see why some people are like, 'Jesus'," says Vlautin.
"Some of the stories in The Motel Life would be true. But the idea behind the kid at the beginning is that he is just lost. What is he doing out on his bike in the snow in the middle of the night? There is no reason for it. The novel is about these lost guys. The brothers haven't done anything with their lives but I think there are pretty decent people who just need an influence telling them how they should be living."
THE FLANNIGANS make mistakes, and in the disturbing opening chapters of the book, they drive around Reno with the body of the teenager in the back of their car, clueless as to what to do. And as narrator Frank says, "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."
It reflects handsomely on Vlautin that despite the horrible premise, the reader cannot but grow to like and worry for the brothers over the next 200 pages - which are enhanced by the evocative sketches of a Portland artist, Nate Beaty.
That compulsion to run away stems, Vlautin admits, from his own adolescent days in Reno, when he assumed he would never leave, destined instead for the self-perpetuating circle of days of casual labour and nights in "old-men bars like the Silver Dollar".
"Just leaving town is a generic American thing but I bought into it full-heartedly. Springsteen was my idol because he wrote so well about it. For me, the second I got my driver's licence, it was like a weight off my back. I was such a shy kid that until I could drink beer I was never calm.
"If I got beer and music, then I would calm out. And I liked getting my mom's car and I would 'run away' to the Sierra mountain range about 10 miles out of town. But see, then I would chicken out - I'm no Charles Bukowski. And I would sit there looking up at the Sierra and beating myself up for being a wimp, for not going exploring. But I'd be kinda scared and get all anxious. So I would go back home."
He has conflicting feelings about his formative days in Reno, wilfully romanticising its most celebrated period as America's pre-eminent divorce town, when Hollywood royalty like Ava Gardner would relocate for the requisite six weeks to party before having their marriages dissolved. His father and stepfather had in common a fascination with the disappeared West.
It seemed to Vlautin that the last vestiges of that life could be found in the struggling bars of Reno's neon gambling strip, a long fantasy mile of cheap rooms, $2 breakfasts and poker tables which have seen better days.
Despite the wildness of its past, the prevailing ethos in Reno in the 1980s was, Vlautin says, "rough, conservative, kind of mean and ruled by television culture". To admit to liking books or films or music beyond the realms of Van Halen or Hank Williams Junior was to risk, as he noted at his reading, being branded "kinda fruity".
"You got the feeling your mom and friends would be ashamed of you for having any progressive ideas about anything. That's how it was. But then, my mom worked a tough job for 30 years so I could have a nice life."
If he had a guiding voice during that period, it was Randall Reed, the enigmatic Nevadan short-story writer who taught him during a creative writing course he took at college.
"He only wrote one novel back in the 1960s and I've not read it, I can't get it. I read his short stories. But I took a writing class at university mostly because my drinking buddies didn't like to talk about books. And I guess I liked Randall so much I started dressing like him. He wore those leather coats like in Shaft and western button shirts and slicked his hair back like in Grease. And he was great, he told me when the stories were full of shit and when they were good. And because I was in bands forever that really nobody liked, I would take any abuse just to be apart of it."
BEYOND THAT, it has been just instinct. He approaches songwriting and prose with the same dreamy compulsion. "It's in the same head space," he shrugs. "Like, I wrote a story about a girl called Alison Johnson and her life kept getting worse in the story. So I felt so bad that I wrote her a love song. And it's embarrassing to admit that's how I spent my time. But what the hell."
Vlautin believes he will always be drawn to Reno's motels and the bars that have stubbornly survived since the heyday of the 1940s. A few years ago he was drinking in a bar in Portland and fell into conversation with a conference of morticians.
"They were asking me where the good bars were. They said they had a hard time getting girls because of their occupations. And when you think about it, it must be tough for a mortician. Unless they find a Goth girl. That's what I told them to do. But I told them the best bar I ever drank in was the Silver Dollar in Reno. And the barman went crazy because he had the Silver Dollar sign in his basement. He got it when the place closed down. And he gave it to me in exchange for a case of beer. It is my proudest possession."
Vlautin was so proud of seeing a copy of his book in a bookshop on Shop Street in Galway that he took a photograph of it. It had been a week of pinching himself. The night before, his publishers at Faber - "those guys have been so nice and I was a bit worried they'd be kinda upper-crust" - took him to a London pub, the Boogaloo.
He had a small signing and a singsong but the main reason he was there was that the place is reputedly Shane McGowan's hangout of choice. And lo if the great bard - Vlautin's father bought him a copy of Rum, Sodomy and the Lash when he was 17 - didn't turn up unannounced.
"He kissed me on the hand and said, 'you're the straight stuff.' And he took a book! It was one of the greatest nights a guy could have. I was calling my friends back in Reno at two in the morning, drunk and screamin' down the phone, "Shane McGowan's just kissed my hand." Hard to know what the whiskey men in The Fitzgerald made of that news.
- The Motel Life is published by Faber (€16.50). Richmond Fontaine's album, The Fitzgerald, is on Union Records.
