The Free by Willy Vlautin
My friends and family never have to worry about what to get me for Christmas or my birthday. I'm always happy with a book they think I’ll enjoy, a gift card to any bookstore, or simply money to buy whatever book(s) I want.
I got a Barnes & Noble gift card from Kate's brother and sister for Christmas. With it, I bought two books. One of which is The Free by Willy Vlautin and the other is Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer. (I’ll be reviewing Annihilation in a future post.)
I'm a huge fan of smaller book stores, where you are surrounded floor to ceiling with books. Redux and Argos are two of my favorites, but Barnes & Noble, the store my gift card came from, still has charm simply because of the sheer number of books available. It's like stepping into a shrine of the popular book gods, stocked with anything you could want or imagine, all fresh from the publishers.
I read a review about The Free and heard that another of Vlautin's books was being turned into a movie (The Motel Life). I crave the type of modern fiction that is loaded with empathy for the beaten down and forgotten souls of the world. Don’t get me wrong, I like eerie science fiction, Gothic thrillers with werewolves, dystopian futures with lost humans, but I enjoy contemporary American literature the most. It paints honest portraits of people struggling to get by. I know those people: I bump into them on the street, I see them at bars, I call them friends.
The Free follows three "normal" people through their trials of debt, mental illness, divorce and life-altering military experiences. Pauline Hawkins, a character in the novel, is a nurse who takes care of many patients during the workday, and goes home to a loose cannon of a father who can't even take a shower without her telling him to. Freddie McCall, another character, is an abandoned husband with too much debt. He works two jobs to pay for the hospital bills that piled up from his daughter who was born with bad hips, and the last main character, Leroy Kervin, is a war veteran confined to a hospital bed after attempting to commit suicide to escape the symptoms of PTSD.
Each character experiences extreme situations that expose their human-ness. The rest of the world sees each character in one realm of their lives and believes that everything is ok. At one of McCall’s jobs in a paint store, his boss doesn't do any actual work. He just comes in, eats his lunch and stays on the phone listening to Focus on the Family with his wife. He has no idea that his lone employee has been abandoned by his wife and is about to lose his home. The one moment that McCall asks for help on a small loan his boss looks at him and says, "Honestly, I can't help you. Times are tough," which made me want to reach through the pages and shake his boss by the color and yell, "You don't know how much Freddie does for you, you lazy son of a bitch! You don't even work there! If he were to quit you would be screwed! Asshole." But I couldn’t, so I just kept reading.
The book slapped me in the face and reminded me of how lucky I am. The title is symbolic because these are everyday people that live in the land of The Free, yet they are fucked up human beings who are slaves to their everyday grind. I felt empathy for them, and at the same time gratitude that I get to wake up and look at a beautiful, compassionate, woman every morning. I have food for breakfast; friends to pick me up on bad days. Sometimes, I find myself complaining or saying I'm too busy or don't have enough money or don't have a super cool job. But the reality is that I have an amazing life where I'm not struggling to buy groceries, not having to work two low-paying jobs just to barely survive.
Unlike these characters, I'm not working as a nurse in a hospital where the worst in humanity can be seen—sometimes the best, too, but you never know if the person you are about to go check on will live another week. I didn't have to go off and fight in a war that I don’t believe in, only to come back a mere shadow of my former self.
Yes, a short novel like this reminded me that I'm a lucky son of a bitch to live this life.
Go pick it up at Schuler's. Then, grab a bottle of Jack Daniels and a pack of American Spirits. Take shot of Jack and a few long pulls on your cigarettes before you dive in.
The New York Times Book Review just did a great review of The Free. If you want more insights into the book, I recommend reading their review too.
