[…] Recently got into the excellent Richmond Fontaine and via their excellent tunes discovered lead singer Willy Vlautin’s novels. On the strength of the reviews and the fact that Vlautin’s narrative songs are bloody brilliant, I decided to try his prose work and bought the first two, The Motel Life and Northline. Still waiting for Northline to arrive in the post, but The Motel Life is one of them new-fangled electronic books and so arrived instantly via the power of the web. So here’s my hundred word review: Willy Vlautin’s debut reads like the perfect extension of the downbeat narratives that populate the songs he writes for Richmond Fontaine, his equally brilliant Americana band. This hard luck story of two rootless brothers pissing their lives away in Reno motels has been compared, justifiably so in my opinion, to Steinbeck. Stories told by Frank to brother Jerry Lee are Vlautin’s take on Georgeand Lennie’s dream in Of Mice & Men. Like Steinbeck’s masterpiece, the hope here gives way to tragedy, though Vlautin never truly abandons his protagonist, allowing Frank a glimmer of hope by the closing lines. A fragile glimmer. […]
[…] was the year I belatedly discovered Richmond Fontaine and the novels of singer/songwriter Willy Vlautin. The High Country is the ultimate merging of […]
Dan Powell 
2 Responses to What we used to think
[…] Recently got into the excellent Richmond Fontaine and via their excellent tunes discovered lead singer Willy Vlautin’s novels. On the strength of the reviews and the fact that Vlautin’s narrative songs are bloody brilliant, I decided to try his prose work and bought the first two, The Motel Life and Northline. Still waiting for Northline to arrive in the post, but The Motel Life is one of them new-fangled electronic books and so arrived instantly via the power of the web. So here’s my hundred word review: Willy Vlautin’s debut reads like the perfect extension of the downbeat narratives that populate the songs he writes for Richmond Fontaine, his equally brilliant Americana band. This hard luck story of two rootless brothers pissing their lives away in Reno motels has been compared, justifiably so in my opinion, to Steinbeck. Stories told by Frank to brother Jerry Lee are Vlautin’s take on Georgeand Lennie’s dream in Of Mice & Men. Like Steinbeck’s masterpiece, the hope here gives way to tragedy, though Vlautin never truly abandons his protagonist, allowing Frank a glimmer of hope by the closing lines. A fragile glimmer. […]
[…] was the year I belatedly discovered Richmond Fontaine and the novels of singer/songwriter Willy Vlautin. The High Country is the ultimate merging of […]
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