Willy Vlautin’s new book, The Left and the Lucky (2026), does again what the author and musician does best: remind those of us in positions of relative comfort that a significant slice of the American story being experienced today includes millions who struggle mightily… yet, among them, we find some of the best of us.
As in his other work, Vlautin’s most recent novel is populated by characters whose persistent hardships and often-fleeting ambitions give the story its heart.
A single household in a working class neighborhood of Portland, Oregon is occupied by an undersized 8-year-old Russell who is emotionally and physically abused by his 15-year-old-brother Carlos; with dad nowhere to be found, mom Connie working at the local strip club, and grandmother Gladys suffering from dementia.
Russell is often home on his own, with Connie working late into the night and Gladys in bed most of the time; giving Carlos and his drunk and stoned delinquent friends every opportunity to terrorize the little boy.
Next door is a middle-aged housepainter Eddie whose drug-addicted wife, Marlene, ran off with another man. Eddie’s not completely alone, though. His old flatulent dog Early becomes a companionable catalyst for the unlikely friendship between Eddie the housepainter and Russell the kid; the relationship that drives the narrative of The Left and the Lucky. Eddie takes Russell under his wing; not to protect him so much as to teach him the skills he needs to navigate his own difficult life. Along the way, Russell teaches Eddie and his crew a few lessons of his own.
Eddie’s primary employee is Houston, who has trouble with drink, showing up for work, and caring much about anything at all. Other painter-helpers include motor-mouth Cordarrel whose embellishments of former glory belie his squalid living conditions; and punk rocker Donny who defies the image that may have just popped in your head when I wrote “punk rocker.”
When I first came across Willy Vlautin—recommended by Walt Longmire creator Craig Johnson— described his work as “literary treasures; like those wonderful gems we stumble upon from time to time without much effort at all.” After poring through all his books, I was left wanting more. Thankfully, his Don’t Skip Out on Me (2018) came with a soundtrack by Willy Vlautin’s alt-country band Richmond Fontaine. The CD was tucked into the back of the book.*
The music evokes the rather pleasant Willy Vlautin melancholia portrayed in the lives of his characters. With titles like “Victor Gets On the Bus,” “Waking Up with Busted Ribs,” and “Finding Horace on the Street,” the tracks tell the story over and over; as they are doing right now as I write.
The Left and the Lucky comes with a soundtrack, too; by The Delines with songwriter Willy Vlautin on the guitar. Song titles track the story on this one, too: “Houston’s Hungover,” “Hot for Housepainters,” “Cordarrel Picks Up Russell From School,” and “Subset Of Superdrinkers.”
The first track on the album describes some of the early pages of the book: “Eddie Falls in Love with a Derelict Lemans.” That red Pontiac Lemans was the hook for me; a car that looks a heck of a lot like that 1970 fire-engine red Chevelle I used to own. (The 1970 Chevelle and Lemans are General Motors “A-body siblings” or “sister cars.”)
I crashed mine in Marietta, Georgia in 1978 just after graduating from high school. And, while reading how much that old beat-up Lemans meant to Eddie, the despair I felt when I lost my car bubbled up in similarly melancholy remembrance of my own troubles long ago; more than just a lost car that I cherished, but the adolescent struggles that it symbolizes for me.
Perhaps you have known boys and men that are oddly, irrationally, attached to their cars; attached to the idea that their car reflects who they are. I’d like to think that I have outgrown this one but that Chevelle was my first car and, there it was, screaming by on the cover of The Left and the Lucky. As if I even needed it, that Lemans was one more reason for me to feel a keen affinity for Willy V. and all his down-to-earth companions.
When I read that early car scene, I had a bit of déjà vu. It occurred to me that I may have read this one before; only to discover later that the early part of The Left and the Lucky paralleled a short story Vlautin wrote more than a decade ago. Eddie and Russell—and the beat-up Pontiac Lemans—have been percolating in Willy Vlautin’s head for a long time.**
Eddie’s Lemans is more than fifty years old and shows it. After he gets it running, Russell asks him if he’s going to hammer out the dents and paint it. Eddie says, “I’m going to keep the dents… I like the dents.” The dents, the scars, make us who we are; the blemishes that hide a story, the visceral evidence that we have survived something.
A story about a struggling housepainter doesn’t seem to offer the promise of high drama. And this is exactly the point. Most of our lives are spent dealing with the day-to-day, having some fun, paying the rent, eating right, getting enough sleep, going to work, to school, reading a book, watching a little TV. Some of us even have the luxury of planning for the future.
In cities across this country, however, there’s an Eddie, a Russell, a Houston, a Connie; those who must wade through quite a bit just to get through the day without getting stomped on. And no matter where you live, Willy Vlautin continues to vividly describe that neighborhood over there on the other side of town where cracked and heaving sidewalks run along oil-stained streets and the chipped-paint houses have porches that sag.
My Chevelle sat on a street like that.
*Books & Such, Craig Johnson from Topanga New Times.
https://topanganewtimes.com/2024/06/28/craig-johnson/
**The Willy Vlautin short story can be found in The Highway Kind: Tales of Fast Cars, Desperate Drivers, and Dark Roads (compiled 2016), a collection which also includes shorts from CJ Box, Michael Connelly, and others.
