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  There is a price to be paid for being weak.

  At the time, the people around me said if you went north you’d find a cheaper, easier place to live. A place where you could afford to buy a house. A place that didn’t have crime or people who looked different or thought different. They were talking about Alaska and Montana and Idaho. I guess, really, I was looking for my north, too. I was looking for a place where no one would give me a hard time for living the way I wanted, for liking stories and movies and books and music, and for liking people who were a little off, who had a hard time getting by.

  “At the time I needed someone in my life who wouldn’t quit, who no matter what would get up in the morning and try. So I invented Allison Johnson and Northline.”

  Allison Johnson and Northline came from that era. She fell into me one night and I began writing her story. It’s a story I’d thought about for a long time. For a while I didn’t know if she’d make it, ’cause I wasn’t sure I’d make it. But the key to the story and the key to her is that she doesn’t give up. For as weak and beaten down as she is, she has the ability to keep moving forward. At the time I needed someone in my life who wouldn’t quit, who no matter what would get up in the morning and try. So I invented Allison Johnson and Northline and wrote it out and revised it and wrote it out again and again. And when I was finally finished I was on my feet and away from that world and, luckily, so was she.

  Read On

  The Northline Soundtrack

  NORTHLINE BECAME A HARD NOVEL for me to write because I began to really like Allison Johnson. I began worrying about her. Every time I put her in a rough spot or let her make a bad decision or made her pay for that decision it wrecked my head. I’d be dark as hell. So I started taking breaks from it and playing guitar, and the songs I came up with were always sad and slow, and they were instrumental. After a time I realized they were about Northline, too. I couldn’t stop thinking about the story even when I was playing guitar.

  I wrote instrumental after instrumental and a lot of them seemed to work together, so I talked with Paul Brainard, the steel player from Richmond Fontaine, and told him I wanted to make an instrumental soundtrack to the novel. I asked him if he would help me with it, and luckily he said yes. He didn’t even give me a hard time about it. He never said, “Does an instrumental soundtrack to a book really make any sense?” (I don’t know.) “Has the publisher asked you to do this?” (No.) “Have they said they’ll take it?” (No.) “Are they going to pay for it?” (No.) He just read the manuscript and decided then to buy into the idea, and together we tried our hardest to create music that would fit the feel of the novel.

  “I couldn’t stop thinking about the story even when I was playing guitar.”

  We recorded it in the basement studio of the house he was living in. We sat down there for hour after hour, and we’d say things like “That note right there feels like Dan Mahony, don’t you think?” or “The way I see it, Paul Newman’s riding in on a horse. He’s dressed like a Mexican bandit. He’s got on a sombrero and he shoots three guys then grabs Allison Johnson to rescue her. He throws her on the back of his horse and they get away. Do you really think the mix feels like that?” Answer: “Maybe if we lower the harmonica some.”

  It was fun, and I was lucky to have time to get to make a record like this with someone as talented as Paul. He’s always been my favorite steel player, and I’ve always wanted to make a record that shows off how great he really is. I hope we have. We were also helped by the guys in Richmond Fontaine (Sean Oldham, Dave Harding, and Dan Eccles) and by our friends Chet Lyster, Dave Lipkens, Dan Davis, and JJ Golden.

  “I was lucky to have time to get to make a record like this with someone as talented as Paul [Brainard]. He’s always been my favorite steel player, and I’ve always wanted to make a record that shows off how great he really is.”

  I guess in the end my hope is that the music reflects the feel of the book, the heart of the book, and that after you’ve finished the novel you’ll listen to the music and once in a while think about Allison Johnson and TJ Watson, Penny Pearson and Dan Mahony, Evelyn and Jimmy Bodie. Maybe the music will help the novel stay alive a bit longer.

  Have You Read? More by Willy Vlautin

  THE MOTEL LIFE

  * * *

  With “echoes of Of Mice and Men” (Bookseller, UK), The Motel Life explores the frustrations and failed dreams of two Nevada brothers— on the run after a hit-and-run accident— who, forgotten by society, and short on luck and hope, desperately cling to the edge of modern life.

  “A hugely compassionate, wildly original road movie of a novel.”

  —Esquire (London)

  “Despite the bleak story . . . Vlautin . . . transmits a quiet sense of resilience and hopefulness.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A sweet and aching story . . . which has drawn comparison’s to the work of Vlautin’s hero Raymond Carver. His prose is steeled with a disconcertingly pure honesty.”

  —The Irish Times (Ireland)

  Praise for The Motel Life and Willy Vlautin

  “An unapologetic ode to self-defeat. . . . Its charm is unassuming. . . . At times its appeal is irresistible. . . . It’s a cliché to compare a novel to a story overheard in a bar, but The Motel Life insists on the comparison. Willy Vlautin is the singer-songwriter for Richmond Fontaine, a band based in Portland, Oregon. The music he makes is very much like his writing: mournful, understated, and proudly steeped in menthol smoke and bourbon. Slighter than Carver, less puerile than Bukowski, Vlautin nevertheless manages to lay claim to the same bleary-eyed territory, and surprisingly—perhaps even unintentionally—to make it new.”

  —New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice)

  “The lead singer for Oregon-based Richmond Fontaine delivers a debut road-trip novel that echoes the spare, bleak style of such writers as Denis Johnson and Raymond Carver. . . . The author conveys the pain and desolate lives of his characters without a hint of melodrama. . . . Anyone who enjoys the story will wish that it went on longer.”

  —Washington Post

  “At any given time there is, somewhere in American fiction, a man sitting in a bar, stone broke, drinking whiskey and beer, and wondering whether to turn up for work or just high-tail out of town. He’s there in Bukowski, in Denis Johnson, and in newcomers like Matthew McIntosh. He’s there, too, in this debut novel by Willy Vlautin. . . . Vlautin is clearly reaching back past Bukowski and the others to the granddaddy of all tragic road stories, that of Lenny and George in Of Mice and Men. Jerry, with a missing leg after an accident jumping a freight train, is dependent on Frank for guidance and reassurance. Frank makes up bedtime stories to soothe his brother to sleep, whether holed up in a snowbound Montana field or another dingy motel room. The stories, with their childish mix of sex, adventure, and optimism, stand in for Lenny and George’s longed-for farm, with its famous rabbits. . . . It’s enough to give a sense of hope to this serene and assured piece of minor-key Americana.”

  —The Independent (London)

  “The novel The Motel Life is being passed around among Reno readers hand-to-hand with fervent testimonials and solemn assurances of its worth. That is how it came to me, and that is probably how I will pass it along. The Motel Life has racked up a lot of praise since its release, but that’s not really the point when it comes to a homegrown masterpiece like this. With a satisfyingly difficult to bear narrative realism, the book matters because it is good—really good. It also might be the most honest piece of literature ever written about our city. I sat reading with dry, but red-rimmed eyes, wrapped in a bundle in the corner of my couch, feeling both irritable and spellbound as I turned the pages.”

  —Reno News & Review

  “The same lost, struggling souls who inhabit Willy Vlautin’s songs in the band Richmond Fontaine find themselves turning up in his critically acclaimed novel The Motel Life. Fans of Richmond Fontaine’s somber alt-country rock will find the book to be a fleshed-out versio
n of the themes Vlautin has written about for years—isolation, downward spirals, and finding a small bit of temporary grace in an unforgiving world.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Full of tenderness, truth, and life. I haven’t read a novel this good in a long, long time.”

  —Guillermo Arriaga, Academy Award–nominated screenwriter of

  Babel, and author of 21 Grams and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

  “A beautifully artless first novel. . . . 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. . . . It’s not only as ineffably sad as a lyric by Willie Nelson but it’s also a richly compassionate and sweetly sad meditation on what Billy Clyde Puckett in Dan Jenkins’s Semi-Tough (1972) called ‘life its own self.’ If there’s any justice, anywhere, The Motel Life will be widely read and widely admired.”

  —Booklist

  “Like all the best bits of Denis Johnson and Raymond Carver worked up into something new and strange and funny.”

  —Nude magazine

  “Sometimes I like to pretend Willy Vlautin invented me. Maybe that sounds weird. If you’ve ever heard his local country-punk band, Richmond Fontaine, you know the people Vlautin writes about tend to be pretty messed up. They’re always broken down or lost or just flat-out at the end of their rope, whereas I’ve been a pretty lucky girl so far. But the reason I like to think he made me up is that if he did, then no matter what, no matter how many times I keep making the same mistakes, he would never give up on me. He’d hold out hope; he’s like that. . . . Frank and Jerry Lee are lost souls, but they’re good guys, and Vlautin keeps trying to help them out. He gives them a dog, he gives them a couple of chances, and he even gives them a Willie Nelson tape. ‘I felt so bad for those guys,’ Vlautin says. ‘They needed Willie Nelson. I wanted them to have that kind of comfort, and to know that . . . that they liked beautiful things, that they weren’t bad guys at all.’”

  —Willamette Week

  “A plaintive ballad about bad luck and good people, in the tradition of John Steinbeck. With lovely line drawings by Nate Beaty, thick paper and a retro font, this covetable book is a bibliophile’s dream.”

  —The Daily Telegraph (London)

  “Both heartbreaking and inspirational . . . written . . . with a simple hypnotic tone that seems as if it was grown in the Reno heat.”

  —Associated Press’s asap

  “A hugely compassionate, wildly original road movie of a novel about two brothers, Frank and Jerry, who are trying to escape the ramifications of a fatal hit-and-run accident. The warmhearted, folksy balladeer proves he’s just as much at home on the printed page as he is behind a mic, with detailed yet understated drawings complementing the tale.”

  —Esquire (London)

  “Willy Vlautin’s Motel Life . . . echoes Of Mice and Men. The story of two brothers, it is set in a contemporary world of American highways, cheap diners, and rundown lodging houses. The odds are stacked against the two, but the sadness of it all is mitigated by the resonance of the prose and a feeling I can only describe as ‘this is as it really is.’”

  —The Bookseller (London)

  “A very fine novel. Writers of this quality—courageous, powerful, and wonderfully compassionate—are rare, and need to be treasured.”

  —John Burnside, author of The Dumbhouse

  “A tale of bad luck, heartbreak and resolute hope. Set in small-town Middle America, it follows two brothers hitting the road to escape the consequences of a hit-and-run accident. Vlautin writes in an engaging and deadpan style, seducing the reader into the narrative until you, like the brothers, can find no escape.”

  —The Guardian (London)

  “Vlautin recently published his first novel, The Motel Life, whose desperate characters bounce from bar to bar, from flophouse to flophouse, [and] also populate many of his songs. According to Vlautin, writing about characters in various dire straits comes naturally, and the Reno native said often he creates fictional characters for songs and stories to help him get through personal strife. ‘I guess the working-class kind of characters are what I feel most comfortable with and understand, and frankly I’m most interested in working-class stories,’ Vlautin said. ‘Those are my favorite stories to read. It’s the stuff that gives me the most comfort. That’s what I like so much about guys like [author John] Steinbeck. They always wrote the same kinds of people. They wrote tons of different stories in different areas, but the heart of his people were always the same, and that’s something I aspire to.’”

  —Salt Lake Tribune

  “The Motel Life is sparsely written but utterly compelling. . . . Bad luck, bad decisions, and heartbreak haunt every tight sentence here, but there is ultimately hope in Vlautin’s writing, a light at the end of the tunnel, which compels his characters forward.”

  —Doug Johnstone, The List

  “Just finished Willy Vlautin’s first novel The Motel Life, and I’m floored. . . . The story is set during a fridgid winter in Reno, Nevada, sometime around now, though there’s a sense that the wayward, rootless characters in The Motel Life could come from any place, any time. . . . Anybody who’s ever done a lot of hard-core traveling—I’m talking hitch-hiking and Greyhound, not airlines or cruise ships—knows of the other side of the American dream. The freeway drifters, the rest-stop campers, and folks on the run from something or to somewhere—the kinds of people you see and make up stories about because you have to place them somehow, to make them less ghostly, more real—these are the people that inhabit this book. . . . And despite it all, there’s hope here, too, in human endurance, in the need for resolution. As Vlautin writes with prose that’s simple but not simplistic, immediately engaging and no-frills, that hope becomes the underlying pulse of the story. It’s what makes this book feel so damn real, so powerful, so much like life, even if it’s not yours.”

  —Jonathan Zwickel, The Stranger’s “Line Out”

  “A sweet and aching story . . . which has drawn comparisons in style and voice to the work of Vlautin’s hero, Raymond Carver. His prose is steeled with a disconcertingly pure honesty [but] the reader cannot but grow to like and worry for the brothers.”

  —The Irish Times (Ireland)

  “The work of a careful and conscientious writer. . . .Vlautin, like his musical equivalents Tom Waits and Shane MacGowan, manages to render pathos without sentimentality in prose whose tone is downbeat, fatalistic and hangdog.”

  —Hot Press (Ireland)

  “Willy Vlautin, frontman for Portland’s Richmond Fontaine, has turned three years as a touring musician and ten years working for a trucking company into a literary device. . . . The dead-enders populating Vlautin’s imagination don’t move forward so much as they indent the gravel with the deep ruts of their insecurities. . . . Whether in song or in print, the furthest Vlautin’s men can move is in circles, shackled to their dysfunctions and their meager paychecks. . . . It’s an almost cruel pastime, wanting Vlautin to crush more small-town souls for our entertainment. But the way his men wrestle with their inner turmoil is a reminder that no matter how many miles you clock on I-5, on 101, or around the corner, the same demons still stare you down through the rearview mirror.”

  —San Francisco Weekly

  Also by Willy Vlautin

  The Motel Life

  Copyright

  P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

  NORTHLINE. Copyright © 2008 by Willy Vlautin. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written pe
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  FIRST U.S. EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBN 978-0-06-145652-7

  08 09 10 11 12 rrd 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780062127297

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