Author Willy Vlautin experiences a recurring problem in his novel drafting process. Because it seems fun, he often takes a sharp turn that upends the draft and wastes a year of work. “I fall apart,” he told me in an early June interview on Zoom. “I quit drinking. I start exercising. I’m just trying to get my brain hopefully firing a little better.” To rein in impulses that put him off track, Vlautin returns again and again to a particular kind of discipline.
“That’s why I write on themes a lot, just because I’ll write on ideas that are important to me. Usually that carries me through. It’s when I just try to write a novel for fun without that, that I usually hit a wall somewhere down the road. And that sucks,” Vlautin said. “There’s nothing worse than throwing out an almost cool novel and then junking it on the side of the road, and you’re like, fuck, man, that just took me a couple years of my life, and now it’s not happening, and you can’t save it.”
Vlautin, acclaimed for his signature, minimalist approach to writing often devastating novels about working class outsiders, published his eighth novel with this year’s The Left and the Lucky, a standout in his bibliography of books that have long taken a critical lens to questions of masculinity.
Twenty years ago Vlautin published his first novel The Motel Life, an exceedingly readable and compelling book that makes a striking first impression in its opening chapter. (“The night it happened I was drunk, almost passed out, and I swear to God a bird came flying through my motel room window,” its narrator recounts in the book’s first sentence.) Critics often put Vlautin in conversation with the likes of Raymond Carver, classifying his works as a contemporary part of the American minimalist canon. He often cites someone he now calls a friend, Barry Gifford, the author of the source material for David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, as a personal inspiration.
Every few years since then, a new Vlautin novel has come out, and they’re all dependably great books that in a succinct two-hundred pages (or so) depict the lives of the sorts of characters not reliably seen enough in contemporary literary fiction. There’s Alison from his 2008 Northline, a woman flees an abusive, neo-Nazi ex-boyfriend. There’s Charley from 2010’s Lean on Pete, a teenage boy ejected from his family who runs off with a race horse that’s been set to be put down. There’s The Night Always Comes’ Lynette from 2021, a pastry lchef at a bakery who also moonlights as a sex worker whom circumstances have forced to quickly amass a large amount of money to save the house she lives in with her mother and disabled brother.
Three of his novels have been adapted into films – The Motel Life in 2012, Lean on Pete in 2017 and Night Always Comes in 2025 – but he had little involvement in any of them. Even before his work as an acclaimed novelist adapted by Hollywood, Vlautin has also had a career in music through Richmond Fontaine, a now-defunct band in which he served as singer-songwriter, and the Delines, for which he now writes and plays guitar. Often, his books and music intersect. Several of his novels even have an accompanying album, including his latest.
The Left and the Lucky, published by Harper and released in April, ends up following more characters than is customary for Vlautin, though it does focus on the unlikely bond between Eddie, a 40-something lonely housepainter hung up on his past, and his neighbor Russell, a sensitive boy perpetually terrified of his troubled, violent teenager brother. It didn’t get a review from The New York Times, but it did receive an endorsement from John Mulaney, who wrote on social media that he finished it in a day: “This one is electric.”
Throughout the novel, Vlautin shifts between characters, sometimes unexpectedly. Russell’s brother Curtis is not a flat villain, but a character that is given his due in segments that follow him in scenes separate from Russell. Vlautin doesn’t often broaden out the point of view of his novels beyond one character, but here it was necessary to properly tell a story about the nature of a broken homelife and how it, per his description, resembles a black-and-white noir movie filled with inescapable darkness, shadows, pain and danger.
“You don’t see color at all. And it can be really destructive and hopeless. And I think that’s where you see those two brothers. But they’re living next door to technicolor, I call it,” Vlautin said. “Life can be really funny. Even with a divorced, small-time housepainter and his crew of misfit, degenerate housepainters, there can be a lot of love in that world and a lot of fun and humor. The day-to-day life is not that bad when you’re not in a dark situation.”
When I recall Vlautin’s works, I think most vividly of pessimistic moments that made me feel incredibly sad and optimistic moments that made me feel incredibly happy. More than any of his other books, The Left and the Lucky is laser-focused on the relationship between those dichotomies. Russell experiences horrific abuse, but when he hangs out with Eddie and his rough-and-tough male friends and co-workers, they frequently stumble upon moments of connection that emerge as achingly beautiful not despite of, but in part because of, their mundanity.
My favorite part of The Left and the Lucky appears half-way in, when Eddie’s friend Cordarrel, self-righteous and braggadocious in spite of his many vices, picks up Russell from school. Cordarrel apologizes to Russell for making him tag along to a yoga class:
“I tried to get us out of it, but my wife said she’s going to call the lady to see if we showed up.”
“I like going.”
“You do?”
Russell nodded.
“What did Eddie make you for breakfast?”
“We had bacon-and-egg sandwiches.”
“I used to eat those. I had to eat oatmeal for breakfast.”
“I don’t like oatmeal,” Russell said.
“Me, neither. Where’s Eddie working?”
“Up in the hills somewhere.”
“Eddie gets the good jobs.”
Russell nodded.
“Cordarrel’s the blowhard,” Vlautin said. “He’s the guy that knows everything, talks about willpower, and then he’s got an eating problem, a drinking problem, still smokes, lies about it all, but at the root of it, he’s a cool guy. Most people are pretty decent, and most people are trying to be good and trying to be a good influence on kids. This guy’s trying to be cool, but he also actually really needs a friend.”
Structurally, when compared against his other books, The Left and the Lucky most resembles The Free from 2021, which alternates between the intersecting stories of nurse Pauline Hawkins, hospitalized Iraq war veteran Leroy Kervin, and Freddie McCall, an overworked man buried in medical debt. What separates the two novels and distinguishes The Free is howthis bookpesents a clear, political message about the consequences of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and its broken healthcare system.
“Those were the wars of the traumatic brain injuries, because they could save the guy, you can save him now, but at what cost mentally to these poor guys? So I started reading a ton about that, because I was so upset by it. And so, in my own way, it was my protest,” Vlautin said. “It was for the patron saint of nurses, Camillus de Lellis. I wrote the book for that saint, so the saint would look after these people coming back like that.”
His published works all display an effort to serve a purpose, even though that typically doesn’t come in the form of a coherent political message. Vlautin has said many times over the years, including in a 2018 interview with Bill Kenower of Author Magazine, that from the age of 18 to 35, he wrote multiple novels “just for fun” that he never showed anybody until an agent pulled The Motel Life out of him.
Vlautin has long been a nervous guy. He captured this in my all-time favorite epigraph, included in his 2024 novel The Horse: “The only way to get through school is to disappear into a song. Just hum it to yourself and you’ll be okay. If you hate being home, hate it here, just disappear into a song. It works, man, I’m telling you it really works.” He credits this quote to “A fifteen-year-old friend of my brother’s talking to me in my mom’s house when I was eleven.”
When I imagine these boys talking, I can’t help but think of the relationships in The Left and the Lucky. When I brought up this epigraph to Vlautin, he recalled another piece of advice he received from that teenager.
“He says, ‘soon, some girl might like you. Be really cool to her, and if she wants you to sneak into her room at night or go meet you in a golf course in the middle of the night, don’t ever tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t tell your mom, don’t tell your brother, don’t tell your friends, just keep it between you and her, and she’ll keep wanting to hang out with you. Just be cool to her and keep your mouth fucking shut, and they’ll think you’re a cool guy.’ I mean, what 15-year-old gives you that advice?” Vlautin recalled. “I got lucky with that.”
He used the word “lucky” again in our discussion when talking about the movie adaptations of his novels. He loved seeing Kris Kristofferson in The Motel Life and admires the Lean on Pete director, Andrew Haigh, who he describes as a “legitimate, serious, badass filmmaker.” The most recent, the Netflix production Night Always Comes starring Vanessa Kirby (which oddly drops the definite article starting the book’s title) didn’t include his input, he said.
“So that felt weird,” Vlautin said. “You know, it’s like, everybody’s to you to a degree, but on the first two, you felt the blood in them trying to make something good. And then the Netflix one, I just didn’t know. And they kind of were like, ‘hey man, this is not your thing.’ And I was like, ‘you’re right, it’s not my thing.’ Because it’s all, by then, it’s all contract shit, you know? And so, it had nothing to do with what I want. That being said, man, it’s a lucky thing.”
Mixed thoughts aside, talking about these films gave Vlautin a chance to reflect on what’s important to him in his career. Some authors crave the notoriety or larger platform that film adaptations can bring, but he appreciates the added support to keep doing what he loves.
“My life’s a lot easier because of those movies,” Vlautin said. “You know, I paid off my house. I did a bunch of stuff that makes me able to write the weird stories I want to write. I can be in my weird band and write my weird stories, in… my little sandbox. I can do my little thing.”
Vlautin struggles less as a person than he used to and has found much more success, but he still sometimes gets anxious. When we spoke in early June, he was in the midst of preparing for a July event in which he’s expected to interview heavy-hitter Ann Patchett, who loves Vlautin’s novels. “I’m really nervous about that,” he said.
When writing, he keeps going back to theme. He makes a point of writing about things he cares about deeply so that he stays motivated out of reverence for those things. It got him through all eight of his novels, he said.
“I did that so I could get out of bed and do it,” Vlautin said. “So I would remind myself, this is why I’m doing it,” almost like humming a song to yourself in your head.
