Don’t Skip Out on Me by Willy Vlautin
A sad, lonely story about Horace Hopper (half Irish, half Paiute) — abandoned by his father, then his mother, then his grandmother, to live and work on the aging Mr. and Mrs. Reese’s ranch in Nevada–until his early 20’s when he leaves all on his own for Tucson to become a boxer. And not just a boxer, but a Mexican boxer, known as Hector Hidalgo. It’s a quiet book, with clean, spare prose, full of loneliness, people on the run, and implicit and explicit questions of identity. (At one point Horace laments to Mr. Reese that he’s just a drunk Indian, and Mr. Reese gently points out that he’s also a drunk Irishman).
I wouldn’t say that nothing happens, but I would say it doesn’t really end up anywhere in particular. You just get the feeling of peering into one of millions of sad, quiet lives marked by disappointment and glimmers of real kindness. And there’s something a little off about Horace–something oddly childlike, especially when juxtaposed with the violence of his fights and his solitary life working in a tire shop and training. He reveres a self-help book he brought with him about becoming a champion almost the way people hold the Bible, and he trusts people easily when he has no real reason to. But I bought every sad minute of it.
Amy P. Knight 