In Willy Vlautin’s first novel, The Motel Life, the narrator comments that “bad luck…falls on people every day… is one of the only certain truths… is always waiting.” Accordingly, bad luck is one of the constants in Vlautin’s work, and stalks the terrain in his third and best book. Lean on Pete is the story of a boy adrift in the mean world. It is an incredible achievement, the novel of the year so far. 

Charley Thompson is fifteen, son to a drunken, broke, careless father, friend to no-one. He spends his summer days watching television or out running while waiting for his dad to come home or, better still, to buy food. Soon Charley realises he must depend on himself, and tries to get a job. He finds one at the local race track, a sad place and yet utterly endearing under the scope of Vlautin’s careful lens. 

Charley falls under the apprenticeship of a detestable trainer, owner, alcoholic and cheat named Del Montgomery. While working for Del, the boy learns a few lessons and earns the freedom to feed himself. Then, the bad luck that has been waiting, that is the one of the only certain truths, strikes. Charley’s father is attacked at home, a result of his philandering, and eventually dies in hospital. Charley is left alone in the world. 

Terrified of the Samoan who has killed his father and the authorities who will try to institutionalise him, he hides out at the track, sleeping in Del’s tack room, finding his only friend in Del’s aging breadwinner, a quarter-horse named Lean on Pete.

Bad luck, again, dictates. Lean on Pete has navicular syndrome, and Del decides the horse is to be “sent to Mexico”. Rather than see his only friend destroyed, Charley steals Pete, along with Del’s truck and trailer, and the real adventure of the novel begins. Leaning on each other, Charley and Pete travel several states (mostly on foot) in a desperate attempt to find an aunt Charley remembers fondly from childhood. Bad luck though, never lets them get far, and to tell more would be to spoil an almighty story.

Lean on Pete establishes itself within the American canon with quiet confidence, elusive charm and stark seriousness. There are echoes of Steinbeck in the writing—in fact he appears in the epigraph—and it’s not an exaggeration to say that the great American novelist would have taken great pride in producing something of this standard. Vlautin is also emulating living greats like Pete Dexter, in that the writing is hard-hitting, merciless and yet drunk on love. 

In a book full of characters that are disfigured, ill-fitting and utterly enthralling, Charley is a shining light, a poor kid whose dreams are to just stay in one place, make friends and play football for school. He is a quiet narrator, who never deserves the trouble he finds and rarely judges anyone, who talks plainly about his stealing and confesses his saddest thoughts to a lame horse. He isn’t as explosive, but as an American character, he’s as engaging as Holden Caulfield or Huck Finn, much more sympathetic and, today, relevant.

His main pre-occupation throughout the book is food. On several occasions he says, “I’m always hungry,” as well as dreaming constantly of food. Vlautin uses lists to great effect in his writing, and often we are reading lists of the food Charley has bought or stolen. Tied in with the journey theme of the book, as well as the horse as sole companion, the book is skilfully crafted, ultimately, as a kind of western. It is a fitting 21st century companion to great American books like The Grapes of Wrath and indeed Huck Finn.

The sentences, like Charley, take comfort in a kind of metronomic running rhythm. Because the writing is so honest and unfussy, moments of emotion or revelation, such as when Charley confesses to all of the things he’s seen, again in list form, are palpable moments, and truly breathtaking at that. We are running through the novel, taking it in like a landscape, affected by it as weather, running faster when we’re scared, or slowing to digest things of great, sad beauty. As we come to the end—and it happened just a little too fast for my liking—we begin to wish it were a circuit, not a one way trip, so that, without break or fear of tiring, we could go back and start again.