Willy Vlautin on spotlighting working-class American life in his novels and music

Amna Nawaz:

Novelist Willy Vlautin has built his career writing about people on the edges of the American dream, working-class families, lonely alcoholics, and those struggling to make ends meet in the fast-changing American West.

While his books have earned comparisons to John Steinbeck, Vlautin is also a musician, telling his stories through song.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown traveled to Portland, Oregon, for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

(Music)

Jeffrey Brown:

It's not often that a novel comes with its own soundtrack, but author Willy Vlautin is also a songwriter and guitarist with the band The Delines. And characters like Eddie, a good-hearted, 40-something house painter struggling to get by in Portland, Oregon, appear in songs and at the heart of Vlautin's new novel, "The Left and the Lucky."

Willy Vlautin:

I have always been obsessed with that idea of kind of broken people or people at the fringes, and so there's those who get lucky and stay on the road and there's -- that get left behind.

Jeffrey Brown:

He's written eight novels to date, mostly stories of the dispossessed, the barely making it, the unsung heroes at the margins of contemporary American life.

He works in a small office looking out at Portland St. Johns neighborhood, surrounded by images, old movie stars, his own heroes, his hometown of Reno, Nevada, a man lying in the street under a sign that reads "Play the Races."

Willy Vlautin:

I loved it so much because half the time I feel like that, half the time I'm grateful that I'm not that guy, but I understand that guy.

Jeffrey Brown:

And we spoke recently in the back patio of Marie's, a bar down the street from his office that makes an appearance in "The Left and the Lucky."

Vlautin told me how books and music saved him growing up.

Willy Vlautin:

My relationship with books and records started just because I'd find one that made me feel less alone, and I loved them so much. You're like, you want to hug the book, you want to eat the records, and you realize you can't. So you have to join up.

Jeffrey Brown:

An early influence was John Steinbeck?

Willy Vlautin:

Passionate teachers in Reno, Nevada, taught me Steinbeck, and I bought it hook, line and sinker. I mean, he wrote about misfits. He wrote about people that no one else cared about. He's funny.

When my life was going sideways, I was with Mack and the boys living in the pipes off Cannery Row. And the other thing was, my mom was a single mom. She struggled mentally. She hadn't had a job before, and she had to get a job. And she got paid less than the men. She was sexually harassed a lot at work, and she was an oversharer.

Jeffrey Brown:

She told you about all this?

Willy Vlautin:

She told me about it all. So I understood how heroic it can be just to show up for work every day.

(Music)

Jeffrey Brown:

Music was his other way forward, including his lead singer and songwriter for the band Richmond Fontaine. But describing himself as painfully shy growing up, performing brought another problem to overcome.

Willy Vlautin:

I forgot that you have to get in front of people. So I -- from 16 to 33, I just was drunk every time I got in front of people.

Jeffrey Brown:

Drinking was to overcome that?

Willy Vlautin:

Oh, yes, that's the only way I could get up there. And so I was not cut out for it, but it did cure me of being that way. If it wasn't for being in a band, I probably would be working in a warehouse somewhere, being too shy to barely go to the grocery store.

Jeffrey Brown:

In fact, he did work in warehouses and other odd jobs, including as a house painter in Portland, and got his drinking under control.

Willy Vlautin:

I always knew what I wanted to write about, and I always wanted to write about the people around me.

Jeffrey Brown:

And his writing now often features characters here in St. Johns, one of Portland's historic working-class neighborhoods, who are struggling in a rapidly gentrifying and far more expensive city.

One recent novel, "The Night Always Comes"...

Actress:

We're in it together. We're getting into it for the family, OK?

Jeffrey Brown:

... made into a film last year, comes with a dedication for the Portland that let a hard-living house painter buy his own house.

Willy Vlautin:

So many cities in the West, the working-class people of the city get pushed out. Whole neighborhoods were changing, and housing prices I think went up almost five times. And so it was shocking to me, the massive growth or influx of money and the way Portland changed. Yes, I had to write about it.

Jeffrey Brown:

And it became the background for "The Left and the Lucky" and an unlikely friendship between house painter Eddie Wilkens and an 8-year-old named Russell from a broken home, a friendship that just might save them both.

Willy Vlautin:

And it was a cool friendship, I think.

Jeffrey Brown:

You enjoyed writing it or finding it?

Willy Vlautin:

Oh, yes. I love -- you can't save people in real life. Yes, you can barely save yourself. But, in books, you can take one broken kid and kind of give him a break. I mean, there's nothing worse than seeing -- like, I can see it. Just going to grocery store, you see some broken kid or some family. I can just feel that stuff.

And so writing about it both eases it out of my mind, and then I can change directions.

Jeffrey Brown:

I don't know if I ever heard a writer say this. So, as a novelist, I mean, you feel like you can save people?

Willy Vlautin:

I always felt foolishly that if everything I was scared of, loved was destroyed by, anxiety-ridden by, and put it in a box, I always thought if I took one of those things out and studied it, wrote stories around it from every angle, that it would take the power away of it.

But what I learned is like, you can hold somebody's hand through a hard time, and it just eases my mind. So you're putting them in a bad situation, yes, sure, but then their friend going through it.

Jeffrey Brown:

At 58, Vlautin says his Delines bandmates, Amy Boone, Cory Gray, Sean Oldham, and Freddy Trujillo, are the musical friends he intends to age and play with. The long hours of writing are what he's best suited for, he insists, like digging a ditch all day without knowing where you're going.

But being in a band, well, he still loves the music and the people.

Willy Vlautin:

The Delines are like the coolest people ever. So I hope to keep doing that band until I'm really old and playing some lounge somewhere, and writing -- I feel, with books, like I got invited to a party that I wasn't supposed to get invited to.

When they published me, I was like, really? You're letting me in to this party?

Jeffrey Brown:

You're in.

Willy Vlautin:

And then I'm like, OK, then I'm going to work as hard as I can in the corner. And don't kick me out of the party. I will be the janitor. I will be the barback. It doesn't matter to me.

Jeffrey Brown:

In addition to "The Left and the Lucky" soundtrack, The Delines latest album is titled "The Set Up."

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Jeffrey Brown in Portland, Oregon.