Bjorn
29-Jan-2010, 08:34
Northline, Vlautin's second novel is still a very worthwhile book (no less so since it comes with its own soundtrack, essentially an instrumental Richmond Fontaine album with some Wilco-like electronic overtones), but it doesn't work quite as well as Motel Life (http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/americas-literature/27138-willy-vlautin-motel-life.html).
I think part of it is the set-up. Whereas The Motel Life was a story of two people and the dynamic between them, this is a story of just one woman - Allison, referred to throughout as "the girl" although she's in her 20s - who, after getting beat up by her nazi (no, actual nazi) boyfriend once too often runs away to Reno, where she tries to piece her life back together. The problem, of course, being that she's never had much of a life to start with. And as well-written as her... I don't want to say descent into, but rather failure at an ascent from crushing depression, despair and drunkenness is, it all gets a little bit too static. There's a reason many of the best country songs are duets.
That said, the book is only 190 pages so that doesn't bother me too much, and Vlautin still has that Townes Van Zandt-like quality in his writing: to take a tired old story in a tired old idiom and add a realistic dimension and sense of urgency that gives it extra nerve, hooked straight into your heartstrings. In a way it's post-modern country music as a novel - adding texture not by describing the diners and the truck stops and the bottles in detail, but by dropping just enough keywords to hook into the images passed down by a hundred songs and films and novels that came before. The meetings between various people down at the bottom are still excellent in the way he gives everyone a fair chance to be heard (at least more than their lives have given them), and he has the guts to end the book on a bleak note. It may lack the joy (if that's the word) of storytelling that Motel Life had, but it's still a fine novel. And I'm really looking forward to film version too; it's made by the woman who made Frozen River, and she and Vlautin seem to have a lot in common - maybe that will be the duet this needed to be?
***00, but a quite strong one.
I think part of it is the set-up. Whereas The Motel Life was a story of two people and the dynamic between them, this is a story of just one woman - Allison, referred to throughout as "the girl" although she's in her 20s - who, after getting beat up by her nazi (no, actual nazi) boyfriend once too often runs away to Reno, where she tries to piece her life back together. The problem, of course, being that she's never had much of a life to start with. And as well-written as her... I don't want to say descent into, but rather failure at an ascent from crushing depression, despair and drunkenness is, it all gets a little bit too static. There's a reason many of the best country songs are duets.
That said, the book is only 190 pages so that doesn't bother me too much, and Vlautin still has that Townes Van Zandt-like quality in his writing: to take a tired old story in a tired old idiom and add a realistic dimension and sense of urgency that gives it extra nerve, hooked straight into your heartstrings. In a way it's post-modern country music as a novel - adding texture not by describing the diners and the truck stops and the bottles in detail, but by dropping just enough keywords to hook into the images passed down by a hundred songs and films and novels that came before. The meetings between various people down at the bottom are still excellent in the way he gives everyone a fair chance to be heard (at least more than their lives have given them), and he has the guts to end the book on a bleak note. It may lack the joy (if that's the word) of storytelling that Motel Life had, but it's still a fine novel. And I'm really looking forward to film version too; it's made by the woman who made Frozen River, and she and Vlautin seem to have a lot in common - maybe that will be the duet this needed to be?
***00, but a quite strong one.