The Motel Life

February 26, 2007
In a gritty debut, Vlautin explores a few weeks in the broken lives of two working-class brothers, Frank and Jerry Lee Flannigan, who abruptly ditch their Reno motel after Jerry Lee drunkenly kills a boy on a bicycle in a hit-and-run. The two are case studies in hard luck: their mother died when they were 14 and 16, respectively; their father is an ex-con deadbeat; neither finished high school. Frank has had just one girlfriend, motel neighbor Annie, whose mother is an abusive prostitute. An innocent simpleton, Jerry Lee is left feeling suicidal after the accident, despite his younger brother's efforts (à la Of Mice and Men's
Lenny and George) to console him: "It was real quiet, the way he cried," says Frank, "like he was whimpering." On returning to Reno, an eventual reckoning awaits them. Vlautin's coiled, poetically matter-of-fact prose calls to mind S.E. Hinton—a writer well-acquainted with male misfit protagonists seeking redemption, no matter how destructive. Despite the bleak story and its inevitably tragic ending, Vlautin, who plays in the alt-country band Richmond Fontaine, transmits a quiet sense of resilience and hopefulness.

May 15, 2007
Frank and Jerry Lee Flannigan's road to nowhere veers straight to hell when Jerry Lee kills a kid while driving drunk. After dumping the body, the brothers take off in a crappy Dodge, drink countless 12-packs of cheap beer, and contemplate their useless existences. Their lives, no picnic since their mom died when they were in grade school and their deadbeat dad took off, are flat and meandering, as is the prose in this choppy, inconsistent effort. Jerry Lee, the simpler-minded of the two, is a lost causehe's missing a leg as a result of a stupid teenage prank, and his one escape is drawing (expressive line drawings at the beginning of each chapter are purportedly his). Frank, on the other hand, has a slim shot at a happier future, though debut novelist Vlautin makes no promises. What could have been as poignant as a short story or a three-minute single (Vlautin fronts an alt-country band) is monotonous and overlong in novel form. For larger fiction collections or where Raymond Carver or Charles Bukowski have a following.Christine Perkins, Burlington P.L., WA

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2007
Author Vlautin, a member of the critically acclaimed alt-country band Richmond Fontaine, has crafted a beautifully artless first novel. It tells the story of Frank and Jerry Lee Flannigan, who are on the run because of a hit-run-and-run accident in which Jerry Lee was involved. Eschewing compound sentences and even similes, Vlautin illuminates the lives of two decent young men from Reno who have been dealt a very bad hand; their mother died when they were teens, and their father, a thief and an inveterate gambler, left years before. They live in down-at-the-heels motels, drink too much, and work at dead-end jobs. Jerry Lee is a self-described loserbut with a conscience. He fails at suicide occasioned by grief, but Frank is there, inventing naive stories to keep him going. Its as ineffably sad as a lyric by Willie Nelson, but its also a richly compassionate and sweetly sad meditation on what Billy Clyde Puckett in Dan Jenkins Semi-Tough (1972) called life itsownself. If theres any justice, anywhere, The Motel Life will be widely read and widely admired.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)