A review by obscuredbyclouds
Don't Skip Out on Me by Willy Vlautin

3.0

Willy Vlautin is one of my favourite authors, so it pains me to give his latest novel only 3 stars. Three stars normally for me mean a book is solid but not amazing overall. Here it's different. The first 3/4 of "Don't Skip Out on Me" waver between four and five stars and then... I'm not sure what happened there, but it really didn't work for me at all.

Okay, first the good part - the majority of the novel. Horace Hopper is a 21 year old boy who works and lives on the elder Mr. Reese's ranch. Mr. & Mrs. Reese see him more of a son than a worker, and he sees them in a similar way. He's got a tragic back story. A father who left when he was 3, a mother who left him with her racist grandmother, where he lives until he moves to the ranch. His grandmother constantly reminds him of that being half native American (and half Irish) is not a good thing, so it's little wonder that Horace wants to be someone else. He dreams of becoming a professional Mexican boxer. Despite not speaking any Spanish, he changes his name, throws away all his Slayer CDs and moves to the city to pursue his dreams.

While some of the dialogue felt a bit forced and the main characters are all of so incredibly good and moral, despite life being so horrible to them, overall I loved it. Willy Vlautin is so good at describing working class poverty, setting atmospheric scenes and at making you care about the characters. The boxing scenes and the sheer brutality of the sport was also really intriguing. At the best of times it read like a mixture of a great Bruce Springsteen song and a Carver shortstory. And then...

I don't like happy endings, I'm super open to really tragic heart-breaking endings. So it's not that I'm opposed to
Spoilerthe main protagonist's death
on principle. I re-read the last page several times to see if I'd missed something. It was so abrupt and the whole
Spoiler"claiming to have cancer"-thing Mr. Reese does to get Horace back to the ranch
just felt very out of character in the way it was written. I understand it was an act of desperation but it just didn't ring true. I'm not sure what happened on the last page because it also felt really rushed. Maybe Vlautin was going for the shock factor, the "Oh shit no! That can't be right!" moment, which I did experience. But it wasn't in a good way. I put the novel aside and and stared at my fiancé, going "Well, shit. That's... shit." (He was reading "Nineteenth-Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction", so I'm not sure he understood what I was on about...)

I feel, I might have given this a better rating if it was another author, but as it stands it's a good book, but a disappointing one. Maybe I'll like it better when/if I re-visit it, when the ending won't come as such a surprise. It's not just the last two pages, though, the last chapters all felt very constructed. I could see Vlautin sitting in his chair going "Mhm, this is a great start of a novel, but how can I let this end super tragic in less than 100 pages?" Maybe I'm far off and he's had this planned out the whole time, but that still makes me wonder why he decided to change the pacing for the worse. I love the feeling of the first part of the novel - and of most of his other ones. The one where time feels to drag, where the lonely and poor and unfair lives seem to go on forever and ever, and there's no escape.

Oh well.