Don't Skip Out on Me

Ever since Vlautin, the singer-songwriter of the longtime Portland alt-country band Richmond Fontaine, started writing novels, I've been hearing how good they are, and I finally sampled one, via an audio download of his new novel (his fifth), which he reads himself in a quiet, earnest, melancholy style entirely appropriate to his story. Horace Hopper, a half-Paiute, half-Irish Nevada ranch hand, wants to be a boxing champion, and he heads out into the world (under the name Hector Hidalgo, because Mexican fighters are the toughest) to make that happen. Horace is flawed (though not as flawed as he thinks he is), and things don't go as he hoped, but his story is told with such truth and tender decency that you won't mind the wringer his story puts you through.