PREVIEW: WILLY VLAUTIN
Cardiff Arts Institute
Wed 10 Feb
words: Thomas Hartrey
The success of the Cardiff Arts Institute’s last poetry, prose and people playing music night, Balloon, proved there is a market for an anecdotal event in Cardiff’s club and comedy scene, so the guys have moved it over to CAI and lined another one up for Wed 10 Feb.
The focus of the night is on Willy Vlautin, who will be launching his new book Lean On Pete. Willy Vlautin is perhaps best known as the frontman for alt country group Richmond Fontaine, but he’s also a writer and anecdotalist, and his tales of the everyday struggles in rural North America have hit home with critics and consumers alike. It can be heavy stuff, coming from a man who has earned comparisons to Steinbeck, but his tales of down-and-outs have an honest charm most can relate to.
In a brilliant pairing, Cardiff writer and Vulcan saviour John Williams will also be speaking. John Williams is famous for his raw portrayal of working-class life in Cardiff (see Cardiff Dead), which’ll mean we get to join the dots between people who live a long way away from one another but share a bunch of similarities. Local DJs Amazing Saddles complete the eclectic line-up. And all this for £2.
Noel Gardner’s review of Lean On Pete (appeared in Feb 2010 issue of Buzz):
Willy Vlautin (Faber)
Portland wordsmith Willy Vlautin’s previous works of fiction – Lean On Pete is his third novel – have met with the ‘Americana’ genre tag. That this is also true of his other job and creative outlet, the rollicking country-rock band Richmond Fontaine, makes the pigeonhole all the more cosy. Lest you be inclined to use ‘Americana’ as a pejorative, though, think again: it might have accounted for a glut of crypto-patriotic cornball sentiment across the artforms, but Vlautin’s unflinching look at a drifting American underclass does not fall into this category. A teenage boy and his father, uprooted and desperate for money, move to Portland in search of work; Charley, the boy, falls in with the local horseracing crowd, who are naturally so crooked they have to screw their collective hat on. Drama is frequent but matters unravel slowly, and Vlautin relates it in a style that prizes storytelling ability over florid prose.