The Motel Life - Softcover

Vlautin, Willy

3.91

3,908 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571228070 ISBN 13: 9780571228072

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2006

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Opening like an early Tom Waits barstool-tale, The Motel Life tells the story of two brothers, Frank and Jerry Lee. Taking to the road in an attempt to escape the hit and run accident caused by Jerry Lee, the novel goes back to tell the story of their unhappy lives. With intense feeling and compassion, Vlautin explores the frustrations and failed dreams of the two brothers - one a natural storyteller, the other an artist - and renders perfectly the sense of entrapment they feel. Will the kid's death shock them out of their torpor or send them ever deeper into trouble? Can Annie James, a girl from their past, offer them any sort of redemption, however slim?

Interspersed with drawings that come to form an integral part of the narrative, The Motel Life is a poetic, moving, beautifully na�ve and tragic fictional debut. Alongside such seminal works as Annie Proulx's Postcards, Raymond Carver's What we talk about when we talk about love and Denis Johnson's Jesus's Son, it should come to be seen as a classic of downbeat American prose.

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Review:

'A hugely compassionate, wildly original road movie of a novel.' -- Esquire

'Redemption comes through story-telling, and this is a tale told in a beautiful tone of deadpan wonder.' -- Niall Griffiths, author of Grits and Wreckage

'The finest American novel I’ve read in some time, so simple, so spare and so honest.' -- David Peace, author of GB84

Book Description:

The Motel Life by Willy Vlautin is a hugely moving slice of downbeat Americana.

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