The Free: A Novel (P.S.)
*Starred Review* There are a number of musician-novelists turning out fine work in both fields, but singer-songwriter Vlautin (he performs with the band Richmond Fontaine) is clearly at the head of this multitalented group. From The Motel Life (2007) through Lean on Pete (2010), he has chronicled, in unsparing, unsentimental prose, the lives of bighearted working-class folk on the wrong side of the economic spectrum. His fourth novel returns to the same terrain, but the ante is upped a notch here as he focuses on the lives of three people in small-town Washington State who face insurmountable obstacles but do so with remarkable grace under pressure. Leroy Kervin is a severely injured veteran of the Iraq War, confined to a nursing home, who lives in an alternate world that is every bit as dystopian as real life; Pauline Hawkins is a single woman who works as a caregiver in the home where Leroy lives and who attempts to save another patient, a heroin-addicted teen in danger from abscesses caused by dirty needles; Freddie McCall, the night man at Leroy’s group home, works two jobs but is slowly, inevitably losing everything in his effort to support his daughters, living in Nevada with their mother. At times, reading the heartbreaking, interlocking stories of these circumstance-ravaged souls can almost seem unbearable, but just when you’re ready to put the book down in despair, Vlautin delivers a moment of not hope exactly but unvarnished, aching humanity that takes your breath away. There are no winners here—and certainly no conventional happy endings (only an occasional, fleeting break in the cloud cover)—but, most important, and this is Vlautin’s point, there are no losers, either. --Bill Ott