Though his novels have been praised by Ursula K. Le Guin and Ann Patchett and adapted into well-regarded films, Willy Vlautin says he began writing fiction for an unlikely reason.
“The reason I started writing, I think, is because I made so many people unhappy playing music,” says Vlautin, who began composing songs when he was just 11 and growing up in Reno. “I lived in the basement below my mom’s room, and she’d go, ‘Just play the electric unplugged after 8 p.m.,’ because she literally went to bed at 8 p.m. and got up at 5:30 a.m.”
“I’m a kid, so I’m like, ‘I’ll just put it on real quiet,’” he says. “And then she’d start banging on the floor.”
Frustrated about bothering his mom and the neighbors, one day he went in search of something different – and found it.
“When I was 18, I went to a library and just started writing one day,” he says. “I realized, ‘Holy [bleep], man, I’m not making anybody mad.”
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Vlautin, who not only became an acclaimed songwriter and performer in the bands Richmond Fontaine and the Delines, is also one of our best novelists writing about the lives of working-class people in books such as “The Motel Life,” “Don’t Skip Out on Me,” “The Horse,” and his new one, “The Left and the Lucky.”
Softspoken, self-deprecating and funny throughout a 90-minute conversation, Vlautin was speaking via Zoom from a friend’s living room, revealing only after being asked that he’d driven 25 miles to the next town over to be there for the interview on time.
“Our whole valley where I live, the internet’s down, and I live in a rural community, and when the internet’s down, you can’t use your phone,” he said, downplaying the effort. “In rural communities, the internet’s always iffy.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Fictional friends
Vlautin says the books, records and movies he loved growing up were more than entertainment; they felt like lifelines.
“Maybe that’s why I leaned on art so much, because I didn’t come from an artistic family or anything like that. I just needed it more,” he says, describing his favorite books and songs as friends. “I probably wouldn’t be writing stories if I was more more normal or was well adjusted like everybody else.”
His interest in writing led him to find a mentor: writer Randall Reed, who was teaching at the University of Nevada, Reno.
“I went to his office hours one day to ask him how short a novel could be,” says Vlautin. “I didn’t want to write a 400-page book. I was like, ‘How short can it be?’” Reed told him 120 to 130 pages would probably work.
After pounding out a 126-page manuscript, Vlautin said he took a class from the older man, who wore Western shirts and a long overcoat. “I used to drive him [freaking] nuts, man, because I started taking a class from him and then I’d go to every office hours he had,” he recalls with a laugh. “I started dressing like him, because I’d never met a real writer. I drank the Kool-Aid.”
Eventually, Reed suggested Vlautin take a night class from poet Gailmarie Pahmeier, the first poet laureate of Nevada. She became a friend and mentor, and he produced so many stories for her that she eventually told him she couldn’t read them all and still do all her other work. “She was always really nice to me. ‘You’re not bad at this,’ was I think her quote,” he recalls.
Vlautin would keep on writing, but he says he stopped sharing it with others. “I didn’t really show anybody from 18 to 35, really,” he says, “I always felt like I was getting beat up for writing [bad] songs, and so I was like, ‘I’m never going to do that to the stories.’
“I just kind of kept them hidden for a lot of years.”
Cults, crime and coworkers
Vlautin’s new book, “The Left and the Lucky,” tells the story of Eddie Wilkins, a quietly heartbroken housepainter who befriends his next-door neighbor Russell, a shy, sensitive eight-year-old who’s terrorized by his rage-filled older brother Curtis. The boys’ mother tries to maintain the peace, but she’s stretched thin, working nights as an exotic dancer and sleeping much of the day.
But Eddie, who encounters Russell wandering alone at the grocery store one rainy night, has a knack for taking care of lost souls, many of whom he employs as house painters.
“Eddie is probably the most sound person I’ve ever written about,” says Vlautin. “I kind of wish I was more like him, man. I think he’s a pretty solid guy.
“As a kid, I was a lot like Russell. I think that’s probably why I wrote the book, really: I always wished there was a guy like Eddie, you know, that would save you.”
The details that Vlautin includes about Eddie’s work come out of his own experience doing the job.
“I was a house painter for years, and so I wrote a bunch of stories about those characters,” says Vlautin, who also credits a quote from Primo Levi about overcoming adversity as inspiration.
“I got obsessed with the idea that you never really know who has that inner strength, the true grit to handle hardship. It’s usually not who you think – it’s like the super tough guy falls apart and the old lady is the one that has the grit.
“I started thinking about that in terms of these two brothers, both dealing with hardship,” he says. “I’ve always been interested in how some people explode, some people implode. Some people take it out on themselves; some people take it out on others, but it all comes from that same sensitivity.”
House painting, he says, wasn’t something he’d planned on doing – he’d avoided it, choosing to work in warehouses or load trucks – but it offered him the freedom to take off on tour with his band. He eventually grew to like it.
“But I was really ashamed of it, because growing up, my cousin dated a house painter,” he says, and Vlautin had not wanted to be anything like her cousin’s boyfriend. “The next thing you know, I looked exactly like him. I got the same sort of truck as him. I was always covered in paint.”
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Vlautin says the painters he worked with were a colorful bunch, and the exasperated affection he feels for them is apparent in the novel.
“You hire so many guys that just wake up with bad ideas, and then they just double down on their bad ideas all day long,” he says. “‘Mildly incompetent’ would be a nice way of putting it.
“I did love the – I guess the word would be – ‘jackassery’ of your co-workers, these just deranged alcoholic weirdos that you end up hiring. Besides wanting to strangle them a few times, I never got tired of them.”
Still, Vlautin says there were times when he imagined any job would be better than the one he was doing.
“I was always looking for a way out,” he says, daydreaming about becoming a bank robber or outlaw, despite having no interest in being a criminal. “You start having deep thoughts, like, maybe I should have a marijuana grow operation, you know?”
That desire to quit the grind nearly led him to make an extremely drastic life change.
“I was going to join a cult at one point in my early 20s because I heard you didn’t have to work all day long,” he says. “This buddy of mine was going to join. He said, ‘…You play music all day. You don’t have to work, and then you go home to a commune full of really great-looking women and they feed you, and that’s all you have to do.’”
That sounded like a pretty good set-up to both of them, he says.
“He and I stayed up all night drinking. I had actually loaded up my suitcase and stuff in my little pickup truck, and then I fell asleep on his couch, and we were gonna leave the next morning,” he says. “I got up about six in the morning and went home.
“When it comes down to it, I’m too straight, man, I’m not hippie material,” he says. “I’m more of just a grunt labor guy.”
Lure of the highway
Although Vlautin continues to write and perform with the Delines – who recorded a soundtrack for the new novel – he says he’d always resisted writing about music until 2024’s “The Horse.” Vlautin describes its protagonist, Al Ward, as a run-of-the-mill working musician who had a pretty good run before making some bad decisions.
“I’d never written about music or musicians ever until ‘The Horse’ because I never really enjoyed reading novels about rock stars. I just didn’t have any interest in it. For ‘The Horse,’ I got interested in the idea of why people still do art. Why does a guy continue to write songs even when he knows no one’s going to hear them? Why do people spend their life writing stories they don’t send out or paint in their garage? That’s how I got into it.”
Vlautin, who recently returned from a 21-day Delines tour that included 19 straight days of shows, provides plenty of hard-earned detail about the life of the gigging musician in the novel. He knows the life.
“I always found great comfort in it. I find doing book stuff on my own a lot more difficult. But that being said, I love the work ethic of writing a lot more than I like the work ethic of being in a band,” he says, the latter involving a lot of logistics about travel, food and lodgings.
“All that kind of stuff takes up so much time, and writing is all just work,” he says, but Vlautin found that he can alternate between songs and books. “When I wrote ‘The Left and the Lucky,’ I wrote a lot of songs because when you’re writing [a book], you get stuck or you get tired or you get burned out, or it’s too emotionally taxing, or whatever it is. And then I’d just write songs.”
Set in the early 2000s, the new novel, which began life as an audio short story called “The Kill Switch,” has a nostalgic feel that, in our current state of constant cacophony and catastrophe, is appealing.
“I always wanted it to feel kind of timeless,” he says, suggesting his love of ’70s movies and older novels makes him less interested in writing about things like cellphones and computers. “I never like novels that lean heavily on today, right now, as far as like technology and what’s hip right now.
“I’ve always written for myself, just for fun. And so I always throw in places that I like,” he says of the bars and businesses in the book. “I put all that stuff in just for me, so I can be around things I love when I’m working.”
That’s even true of music in the novel, such as a clock radio that blasts the heavy metal band Judas Priest’s “Heading Out to the Highway.”
“My band, Richmond Fontaine, we used to cover that song,” he says. “I just thought, the poor mom, getting three hours of sleep and gets woken up by that song. But I did it as a joke for my old band.”
Vlautin says he still loves life on the road and likes being a cog in the band’s machinery, but he admits some things have changed for the worse over the years, such as reading in the van.
“The only good thing about touring, at least when I was younger, was I could read a stack of novels on the road,” he says, but it’s harder now he’s the one who needs his rest. “I’ll get three pages in, and I fall asleep.”