Review: THE FREE by Willy Vlautin

I had the pleasure of interviewing Willy Vlautin yesterday, who was in town to promote his latest novel, THE FREE (Faber). I reviewed the book for the Irish Independent last weekend. It ran like this:

Once best known as a singer-songwriter with the alt-country outfit Richmond Fontaine, Willy Vlautin has garnered an increasingly impressive reputation as a novelist since the release of his debut, The Motel Life (2006). His fourth book, The Free, is set in the American northwest, and opens with wounded soldier Leroy Kervin, a veteran of the Iraq conflict, attempting to commit suicide during a rare moment of clarity.
  Leroy fails in his bid but remains in a coma in hospital, which allows Vlautin to introduce characters who are directly affected by Leroy’s actions. Pauline, a hard-pressed hospital nurse who cares for her housebound father and tries to help a vulnerable patient, the teenage girl Jo, to escape the clutches of a group of heroin addicts; and Freddie, who works a nightshift at the group home where Leroy lived while also holding down a day job at a paint store. Meanwhile, Leroy’s comatose mind drifts into the realms of fantasy as he imagines himself on the run in a post-apocalyptic America, where vigilantes roam the streets killing people stained with ‘the mark’.
  The Free is an ironic title here, given that Vlautin’s story revolves around characters who live regimented lives in which every minute and every last cent must be accounted for. The hardworking Freddie and Pauline are victims of the economic crash and personal circumstance: Pauline supports her helpless father, while Freddie remortgages his house twice to pay for his daughter’s medical bills. Told in the ‘dirty realist’ style that evokes the spirit of Raymond Carver, the novel is a litany of tiny tragedies that brilliantly evokes the soul-destroying monotony of functioning poverty.
  If it’s a bleak read in that respect, The Free is nevertheless an uplifting tale. Not only do the debt-ridden Freddie and Pauline rarely complain about their daily drudge, they also find it within them to stretch their personal resources to breaking point by investing themselves emotionally in other people. Pauline’s repeated attempts to rescue Jo add an unnecessary strain on her already overloaded schedule, while Freddie finds time to visit Leroy in hospital, and further tries to help out an old friend who is going to prison.
  There is a danger, of course, that Vlautin’s variations on the theme of the kindness of strangers might render Pauline and Freddie secular saints, but he never mistakes sentiment for sentimentality. Both characters are aware of their own failings and shortcomings, and are likeably honest about their limitations.
  The downbeat, fatalistic tone (and the dystopian strain to Leroy’s sci-fi fantasy) suggests that Vlautin has in mind here a commentary on how the US government has abandoned its responsibility to its own citizens over the last decade. What makes The Free a compelling read, however, is the way in which he celebrates the indomitable spirit and invisible heroics of those refuse to accept an imposed bondage in the land of the brave and the home of the free. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Independent.

Perchance To Dream

I had a nice little back-and-forth with Adrienne over on Goodreads a couple of weeks ago about the ‘It was all a dream!’ story. Adrienne isn’t a fan, and I know she isn’t alone. Personally, I have no problem with a story that eventually reveals itself as a ‘dream’ – a good story is a good story.
  I suppose there’s an element of feeling cheated when a story is revealed to be a dream, or not real. It’s the Bobby-in-Dallas scenario, where a series of Dallas starts with Bobby stepping out of the shower, and we realise that the entire previous series was all Bobby’s dream. Viewers who invested in the characters and their ups and downs felt cheated, because it meant that none of those ups and downs really happened.
  Of course, we all know that none of those events really ‘really happened’ – for all that it was rooted in a recognisable reality, Dallas was fiction. But maybe that’s the crux of the matter, the unspoken agreement when it comes to fiction. The writer does his or her best to make a story realistic, and the viewer or reader meets the writer halfway in suspending his or her disbelief.
  If the writer oversteps the mark and makes it explicit that the fiction isn’t real, the illusion is shattered. An intact stained-glass window is a fabulous creation; the smashed fragments of a stained-glass window rather less so.
  I have a dog in this fight, so to speak. Absolute Zero Cool is a story about an author interacting with his characters as they try to write a novel. Absolute Zero Cool is a fiction, but it’s one in which ‘reality’ interacts with ‘fiction’ as the author struggles to control his characters. Some people liked the premise; others found it off-putting and alienating.
  Perhaps that’s because all fiction, regardless of genre, is escapism. Even the most seriously intentioned of literary fiction transports us to a different world, or at the very least a different way of experiencing this world. That’s a wonderfully liberating sensation, a kind of out-of-body experience that allows us to see and hear and know things we might never otherwise have known if we had remained mired in our own reality.
  If a fiction fails in terms of escapism – if it reminds us too forcefully that it is fiction – then the effect of the stained-glass window, that prism that allows for the beautiful interplay of light and imagination, collapses at our feet. John Gardner – a novelist in his own right, but perhaps better known as the author of On Becoming a Novelist, and for being the mentor of Raymond Carver – declares that a good story should be “a vivid, continuous dream”. The dream must be vivid, but it must also be unbroken.
  On the other hand, we’re all adults. We know that we can’t travel interstellar distances. We know that ghosts don’t exist. We know that private eyes don’t solve murder mysteries with a gun in one hand and a dry martini in the other. We know, as we physically turn the pages without allowing our imaginations to blink, that we are complicit in making this dream ‘real’.
  It takes a lot of psychic energy on the reader’s behalf to make the dream ‘real’. Perhaps that’s why the ‘It was all a dream!’ story feels like a cheat to some people. Or why some readers object to being reminded that the ‘dream’ is in actual fact a dream.
  But is that kind of story any less legitimate than the story that is fully escapist? Is a story, say, in which characters become aware that they are characters at the mercy of an interventionist Creator, a waste of a reader’s psychic energy? And is it superfluous arrogance on the part of the writer if, having met with a reader who fully commits to the dream, he or she then whispers in their ear, ‘Remember, it’s naught but a dream.’
  I’d love to hear your opinions, folks …

Burke On Burke; Or, Why Some Writers Are Too Good To Read

Many, many moons ago, when I was still young enough to read without prejudice or expectation, I picked up a book called ‘The James Lee Burke Collection’. I was poor then, or a little poorer than I am now, and three novels in one book represented value for money that was impossible to resist, especially as I was browsing in a second-hand bookstore at the time. The collection comprised TO THE BRIGHT AND SHINING SUN, LAY DOWN MY SWORD AND SHIELD, and THE LOST GET-BACK BOOGIE.
  If you’re a James Lee Burke fan, you don’t need me to tell you that the collection, even if I’d paid a hundred quid for it, would have been good value for money. Even the cover was fabulous, featuring a moody, sepia-toned black-and-white shot of a wrecked and gun-shot car abandoned on desert flats, a dark and stormy sky brewing overhead. As for the novels themselves, well, you could have substituted the car on the cover for any of the protagonists. Men gnarled and worn down, sand-blasted by lives lived too hard on the edge of nowhere. When I think of those novels now I think of Cormac McCarthy’s border trilogy, of Richard Ford’s THE ULTIMATE GOOD LUCK, of Raymond Carver and Hemingway’s TRUE AT FIRST LIGHT.
  That’s not to suggest that James Lee Burke is a writer on a par with literary giants such as McCarthy, Carver, Ford and Hemingway, or trying to sneak Burke, who is marketed as a crime writer, into the literary pantheon through the back door. I’m saying, definitively and brooking no argument, that James Lee Burke writes novels so good that he’s entitled to have the likes of McCarthy, Carver et al compared (favourably) to James Lee Burke, and I can only pity anyone who is so blinkered as to be blind to that fact.
  The first time I walked into a bookstore after EIGHTBALL BOOGIE was published (a fine emporium in Galway called Charlie Byrne’s, as it happens), said tome was nestling on the shelf beside those of James Lee Burke. Even at the time, high on the improbability of it all, I didn’t kid myself that EIGHTBALL deserved to be in the same shop, let alone on the same shelf; still, it was nice to see it there, if only for the incongruity. Even now, looking at the copy of The James Lee Burke Collection I’ve fished down off the shelf, I’m getting a shiver of anticipation at re-reading those novels yet again at some distant point in the future.
  So how come I’ve never read a Dave Robicheaux novel? Well, it’s complicated. Partly it’s to do with the sheer volume of Robicheaux novels (18 at the last count) and no longer having the kind of reading time that would allow me dive in with THE NEON RAIN and work my way forward; but mainly it’s because the writer part of my brain (tender, fragile, endlessly prone to self-doubt) understands that repeated exposure to James Lee Burke does very little to promote confidence in a writer. To read one great novel is one thing, and there are few pleasures to beat accidentally stumbling across a terrific novel; and nothing pleases me more, when I do discover a great novel, than to be in a position to trumpet the good news from the rooftops. But to willingly subject myself to repeated excellence such as James Lee Burke offers? At least Cormac McCarthy has the good grace to publish a novel only once every five or six years, or more; and Hemingway and Carver had the good grace to die, and so on; but Burke does it year after year after year.
  I do look forward to that distant point in the future, when the kids are reared and my fortune made, and I’m sitting on the balcony of my pension on a remote Greek island, a pomegranate sun sinking into the bottle-green sea, and reaching up to the bookshelf for THE NEON RAIN. Until then, though, I think James Lee Burke will have to wait, even if the signed copy of THE GLASS RAINBOW I received from Irish crime fiction’s most dedicated friend, Noo Yoik’s Joe Long, sits temptingly on a shelf within easy reach …
  All of which is a roundabout way of pointing you towards a rather fine piece the Dark Lord John Connolly published at his interweb lair, which is the introduction he wrote to a new and limited edition of THE GLASS RAINBOW published by Scorpion Press. To wit:

“For many of my generation of mystery writers, James Lee Burke is the greatest living author in our field, and one of the most accomplished literary stylists in modern American letters. For better or worse, I would not be writing without his influence, and all that I have written, I have written in his shadow. To borrow a phrase used by Jack Nicholson of Marlon Brando: “When he dies, everybody else moves up one.”
  “Burke’s preeminence is due, in no small part, to the manner in which he came to the mystery novel. Before publishing, in 1987, The Neon Rain, the first book to feature the recurring character of Dave Robicheaux, he had read little in the genre, the work of Raymond Chandler and James Crumley apart, so he approached the task of writing a mystery largely freed from any obligation to the perceived requisites. The books that have emerged in the decades since are, in a sense, only incidentally mysteries: they are, first and foremost, literate, literary, socially engaged novels. To read them is to encounter a great novelist applying his gifts to a sometimes underrated form, reinventing and reinvigorating it by his presence …”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

The Lone Ranger and Toronto

Canada is justifiably lauded for many things, but gritty urban noir isn’t one of them. Unless, of course, you’re one of the cognoscenti who’s read John McFetridge’s (pictured right, in classic ‘having cake and eating it’ mode) ‘Dirty Sweet’ (2006) and ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’ (2007). Pared-down tales of Toronto’s dark underbelly, the novels have been favourably compared with Elmore Leonard’s Detroit-set stories for their smartly observed characters, sharp dialogue, and a willingness to go beyond simplistic characterisations to explore the complex nature of crime and criminality.
  His latest offering was published last year in Canada as ‘Swap’, but arrives in the US bearing the title ‘Let It Ride’. It’s his best novel yet, a distillation of the elements that made the previous novels such compelling reading, and yet it’s a complex story of interwoven motivations that virtually defies a synopsis. John? Can you tell us what it’s all about in fifty words or less?
  “My publisher would love it if I could,” he laughs. “It’s about how relationships change over time, how the balance of power shifts ... It’s about an ex-marine who comes to Toronto from Detroit to set up a supply line for drugs from a guy he met in Afghanistan who’s now a member of a biker gang. And he meets a woman who’s robbing spas and wants to rob the bikers. And there are cops ...”
  Before John McFetridge, Toronto revelled in the name of ‘Toronto the Good’. Is it true that he’s personally responsible for the steep rise in Toronto crime statistics? Is it even safe to visit Toronto these days?
  “Yes, this is true, the only crime in Toronto is in books, otherwise it really is New York run by the Swiss. No crime, clean streets, all the people friendly all the time. Honestly, though, almost everything that happens in my books has its roots in something that actually happened here, from the closed-down brewery being used as a giant grow-op to the eight bikers killed in one night, to the highest ranking narcotics officers on the Toronto police being arrested for drug dealing.”
  As in all good crime writing, McFetridge’s tales explore how conventional notions of street-level criminality impacts on all strata of society, a pervasive poison that goes right to the top of the power structure. Is there a moral dimension to writing that kind of fiction? Or is crime fiction purely an entertainment that reflects the world we live in?
  “If it accurately reflects the world we live in,” he says, “then I think that’s the moral dimension. I try to show the circumstances that allow the criminals to operate, the ways that they justify criminal behaviour to themselves as being just business, and the internal politics and the restrictions on the police that make it difficult to catch these guys. Any conclusions are up to the reader.”
  McFetridge gets compared to Elmore Leonard quite a lot. Does that ever get boring?
  “It’s certainly not boring yet, though he must be getting tired of the number of writers being compared to him. I think it’s a style of writing that’s almost a genre of its own by now. I think of it starting with Hemingway and short stories like ‘The Killers’ and ‘Fifty Grand’ and then maybe it split into crime and literary with Elmore Leonard, and everyone who gets compared to him in the crime camp, and people like Richard Ford and Raymond Carver in the literary camp.”
  Are there any writers who make him you bite his fingers with envy?
  “Lots. So many. And the great thing is there are more all the time, every year more writers come out with debut books that are so good.”
  That said, McFetridge is of the opinion that there should be more good writers getting published every year.
  “I know of a few very good writers,” he says, “who’ve had a number of books published, who are having trouble finding a publisher for their new work. More and more I see any book that falls outside the easy description, that’s difficult to categorize or take risks - all the things that literature should do - having trouble finding a publisher. I can understand the employees of the publishing companies having bosses to answer to who have shareholders to answer to, so the drive becomes the most amount of profit in the shortest time above all else, but that mentality isn’t really the roots of publishing.”
  To that end, McFetridge has recently taken the radical step of setting up a writers’ co-operative organisation.
  “The idea is a kind of novelists version of the original United Artists,” he says, “a company run by the artists. Democracy sounds like a great idea but it’s messy and hard to work on a day-to-day basis, but I’d like to try. If the co-op members are all people who love books and who love literature and that’s their main priority, then I think it’s possible they could do great things. I’m not suggesting it be a non-profit organization (at least not on purpose) but that the drive for the most amount of profit possible not be the main decision making factor all the time.”
  It’s a fascinating concept, especially given the technological advances of recent years, which should in theory make it a lot easier for writers to connect with readers while minimising the number of middle-men involved in the process. For more info, clickety-click here ...
  Meanwhile, do yourself a favour and check out John McFetridge’s superb ‘Let It Ride’. If its quality is anything to go by, Toronto’s Lone Ranger won’t be riding away into the sunset any time soon.

  This article was first published in Crimespree Magazine.

Swan, Swan, Hummingbird – Hurrah!

Given that the ever-radiant Marsha Swan is the mastermind behind Hag’s Head Press, the original publisher of THE BIG O, it might seem like incestuous log-rolling for me to plug her forthcoming pair of interlocking novellas, THE PUNCHING MAN / BOYS ARE ELASTIC, GIRLS ARE FANTASTIC. But the story runs thusly …
  Marsha was the editor on my first novel, EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, which was published by Sitric, a now defunct imprint of Lilliput. Given the – shall we say – idiosyncratic way Lilliput goes about its business, I still hadn’t even heard of Marsha Swan by the time her independently published debut novel, DIRTY SKY, appeared some years later. But I was hugely impressed, and said that it reminded me of a more dynamic Raymond Carver when I reviewed it. Later again, Marsha got in touch to promote another Hag’s Head Press offering, Sean Harnett’s AISLING LTD, and in passing asked if I was working on anything on the time. As it happened, I was sitting on a cushion stuffed with rejection slips for THE BIG O …
  So it’s with a crystal clear conscience that I thoroughly recommend to you THE PUNCHING MAN / BOYS ARE ELASTIC, GIRLS ARE FANTASTIC. Quoth the blurb elves:

In THE PUNCHING MAN, Remus, a young Roma boy adrift in Dublin, becomes intrigued by a man he sees punch a stranger on the street. When Remus and his friends begin following the man, it quickly becomes unclear who is following whom. But Remus has even less comprehension of the biggest things in his life: the family who will adopt him, the country he will live in, how he will make his way in a new and daunting city.
  In BOYS ARE ELASTIC, GIRLS ARE FANTASTIC, Ruth abandons her life and career in Chicago to move to Dublin. She marries a man she met on holiday there, even though she doesn’t fully understand why—at 46—she’s suddenly ready to gamble on romance. The life she might have had changes abruptly when she is diagnosed with breast cancer and decides to take a challenging job in the Christian Brothers school where Remus is now a student.
  These interlocking novellas, published in one edition, offer two foreigners’ perspectives on a city where they quickly find themselves fighting against shadows: a culture they don’t understand and don’t have access to; bullies on the schoolyard and in the staffroom; a mysterious stranger or a mysterious disease. In this finely observed portrait of Ireland at the turn of the 21st century, Marsha Swan writes with a stark lyricism, giving voice to two very different characters navigating enormous change with hope and dignity.

  So there you have it. For those of you interested in such things, Marsha will be launching THE PUNCHING MAN / BOYS ARE ELASTIC, GIRLS ARE FANTASTIC in Dublin next week, on Thursday, September 18, in Toner’s of Baggot Street. The evening kicks off at 6.30pm, and all are welcome. Oh, and I’ll be the guy at the bar mumbling about Ray Carver …