Vlautin from the Rooftops

The act of writing might be described as a benign way of turning a neurosis into a vocation – and for the lucky few who can keep their overheads below their advances, a living.

“Between you and me, writing is all I ever think about,” says Oregon-based novelist and Richmond Fontaine frontman Willy Vlautin. “I started writing as a crutch when I was a kid, 13 or 14, mostly fantasy stories, and then when I was about 20 I started writing pretty seriously. It evens out my head when I write. I’m nicer to be around ‘cos I can get all the things that haunt me or worry me out, and I can control ‘em.”

But as anyone who has read Vlautin’s three downbeat but resolutely decent novels (The Motel Life, Northline and his latest, Lean On Pete) will tell you, there’s a always a shadow side.
“What kills me is self-doubt,” he says. “My ability with language. And just my intelligence. I’m really hard on myself about all that stuff. But for me the day that I found out The Motel Life got bought, it was one of the biggest monkeys off my back. That’s a lucky feeling to have. It takes a concrete weight off your back and then hands you a pick.”

And Vlautin has certainly multiplied his talents. Three novels in four years, and Lean On Pete is his best, the hard luck story of a disadvantaged teenager, Charley Thompson, who harbours ambitions to be a football star. Shortly after moving to Portland with his dissolute father, Charley begins working at the local track, where he befriends an aging racehorse that he attempts to save from the boneyard.

Vlautin belongs to a long tradition of writers – among them Nelson Algren, William Kennedy, Ray Carver and Denis Johnson – who anatomise the underbelly of dispossessed America, but his tales rarely glamourise their subject matter. This is no college dropout who once drank a couple of Buds for breakfast and thinks he’s Bukowski. Vlautin’s stories possess an Edward Hopper diner melancholia. Like those of Steinbeck, they hit you where it hurts.

“I am really influenced by Steinbeck,” Willy admits. “I have his picture by my bed and quotes by him, just because he wrote about dire situations and working class people with great romance, and although he’s really sad there’s great heart to it. Even when I was a kid it brought me great comfort.

“I was trying to write Lean On Pete like an adventure story,” he continues. “I wanted to be around someone that, no matter what happened to ‘em, they kept trying. And also, I’m still really conflicted over horse racing ‘cos it’s always been one of my favourite things to do, but the more I’ve dived into it the harder it is on me ‘cos it’s a rough sport.

“Sometimes it seems pathetic and ridiculous to be drinking beer and betting money on jockeys risking their lives and horses living a pretty rough life – and risking their lives. We have kind of a rundown track, Portland Meadows, which is in the book, and you see too many horses and jockeys getting hurt without making any money, with no glory days in sight, and it just starts eating at you.”

Therein lies the book’s residual power, its evocation of classic American subjects – the young kid with dreams of sports stardom, the noble beast, the last-chance gamble – except when rendered in Vlautin’s beautifully spare prose these archetypes come off as a little more... scuffed.
“You know, I never even think about it like that, but I guess you’re right,” he concedes. “I played sports in high school and I really wanted that kind of stability day in and day out, trying to do something decent. And I think that’s why my guy Charley Thompson does that as well.

“If things are rough for me, man, I always try to write about something that will at least help my head out a little bit, and that kid sure did. He spends his whole life reacting to things ‘cos he hasn’t had enough of an easygoing time to think about where he’s going. Plus he’s really young. He doesn’t dive into his psyche or talk about himself very much because he isn’t there yet.
“So I think all that’s on his back, and his introspective side and his past will come and haunt him later on when he’s rested up and has a chance to start thinking about things. He’s really simple, and that’s why I had him run so much, because every time he gets worried he goes running, and when he’s tired he doesn’t think about anything.”

No great mystery then why the kid identifies so closely with the horse. His situation is so dire he never allows his mind to roam beyond where he’s going to sleep at night and where the next meal is coming from. Charley reels off lists of groceries as if he’s afraid of or unable to think about anything more substantial than basic food and shelter. Shades of Orwell: “Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though all one’s blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted.”

Can Willy remember when the idea for Charley Thompson’s story first came to him?
“Y’know, it started as a six verse folk song that every time I’d play it for someone they’d either fall asleep or just go, ‘Jesus dude, this is so depressing – what’s the point?’ So I just started writing it as a novel. And I’d go out to the track and it seemed like at least once a week a horse would break its leg, and you just start thinking.

“Portland Meadows is near this pocket of really rundown houses, and once in a while you’ll see a kid like Charley Thompson working on the back side of the track, and so it kind of started from there. I’m friends with a jockey out there and she told me about people living hand to mouth in tack rooms. The other thing is I own an old Portland Meadows racehorse, and he’s really Lean On Pete, so I was kind of writing about him as well. Just the basic idea of trying to get a racehorse out of a bad situation, and the only one who could do it is a dumb kid.

“The dream for me is to write books that you can carry with you,” Willy concludes. “Luckily for me I don’t work a straight job, but when I did, it took a certain kind of book for me to read at night and not fall asleep, when you know you have to get up at six in the morning but you can’t put it down. A book that a guy would carry in his pocket, but also maybe it means something to him besides being a quick fun read.”