The Free: A Novel (P.S.)
“Vlautin’s novels cast a spotlight on the underclass and underbelly of this land and gives voice to those who may no longer have one.”
A critically wounded soldier injured in Iraq lives in a nursing home, fails in a bid to kill himself, and lies again in intensive care. A kindly night watchman from the soldier’s nursing home who works two jobs and is separated from his wife and children, struggles to pay the bills necessary to keep his house. And a tough but loving nurse showers her patients with unending compassion, sympathy, and love while also caring for an embittered and half-crazed father.
These are the lost souls who inhabit Willy Vlautin’s fourth and best novel to date. With heartbreaking yet hopeful prose Vlautin weaves together a brutally honest tale of pain and isolation in America; of trouble and strife, both economic and spiritual. In doing so, Vlautin tears away the thick fabric of lies, promises, and deceit. Instead, The Free lays bare a nation of individuals who are trapped, tapped out, exhausted and running on empty when it comes to hope. In this new and nasty world order, it is only the gracious and often surprising kindness of strangers that help us help each other get through every new day with a flickering ember of hope around which to build a fire that can warm us all.
This literary terrain Willy Vlautin tills is nothing new for the 46-year-old author, who also leads a Portland, Oregon-based alt-country, roots band named Richmond Fontaine. If you’ve never heard his name before or the name of his band, you’re not alone. Despite nine studio albums and three previous novels including The Motel Life, Northline, and Lean On Pete, Vlautin’s following has received more critical acclaim than popular favor—and that very well may be fine with him.
As a matter of fact, the job of fronting a band and promoting his own CDs and novels one small room at a time on a journey back and forth across America is the very thing that allows Vlautin to see America from a grunt’s perspective. As he travels by bus or car through the rust and decay of the modern American wasteland, to cheap hotel rooms or friend’s couches, he’s been able to pick up the angry, lonely, and bitter tone and timbre and specific cadences of speech that enable him to master honest and resonant dialogue and prose.
It was another troubadour and singer-songwriter named Bob Dylan who early in his career wrote with similar compassion and conviction “for the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse.”
Like another link in the chain, Vlautin has followed Dylan’s lead by creating characters who are drifters, runaways, dreamers, searchers, and schemers. These are the people whose stories Vlautin seems so intent on telling, the lost souls in the mainstream of a nation where the middle class shrinks more with each passing day and income inequality grows. Vlautin’s novels cast a spotlight on the underclass and underbelly of this land and gives voice to those who may no longer have one.
As The Free begins, a shell of a young soldier named Leroy Kervin, injured in a bomb explosion in Iraq, wakes one night from another deep, dark dream to realize that for the first time since a roadside bomb blew away his comrades and most of his former self, he can suddenly see, hear, touch, and feel.
Knowing that he may never be able to reach this kind of clarity again, he crawls to the top of a staircase and throws his lifeless body down onto the spikes of a wooden fence. Rushed to the emergency room, Kervin is again kept from dying and ending his ongoing nightmare.
For the remainder of the novel, Kervin's thoughts are transposed by Vlautin in a morphine-confused dream journey, a kind of story within a story in which Leroy and his lover are trying to flee a militarized nation attempting to exterminate all of those individuals who choose not to fight.
Freddy McCall, working the graveyard shift at the nursing home was sleeping on the job the night of Leroy’s failed suicide attempt. Now despite working 20-hour days, Freddy visits the critically wounded veteran nearly every day at a nearby hospital. McCall lives on a diet of Ramen noodles and energy drinks, working by day at a hardware store and by night at the nursing home. Facing foreclosure on his home, Freddy is forced to get his hands dirty in an illegal drug operation that seems like a terrible idea from the start.
But perhaps the real heart and light of this novel comes from the unconditional patience and kindness of an overnight nurse named Pauline Hawkins. (Vlautin dedicates the novel to the patron saint of nurses). Tough on the outside, but a real softy on the inside and graced with an absolute heart of gold, Pauline tries to fill up her lonely personal life through her work. She cares not just for Leroy, but also for a host of other patients including an old man with stage IV cancer and a young girl named Jo, who is homeless and dying from abscesses caused by heroin injections.
With direct and straightforward prose, Vlautin paints a not-so-pretty portrait of contemporary America, a land gone to waste with far too many strip malls and coffee shops on every corner.
Vlautin’s fourth novel is a kind of a message in a bottle—an S.O.S. of sorts. And he’s too insightful and wise a writer to serve up happy endings. But he demonstrates that even in the muck and mire of everyday life there are many heroes around us who believe in finding salvation via our ability to care for one another. At its core, The Free is a cautionary tale for anyone who ever had the dream of living in the “land of the free.”