The Left and the Lucky is the moving large-hearted story of a young boy in danger of slipping through society’s cracks and the unlikely father figure who takes him under his wing. “And try to breathe, man. You gotta remember to breathe. You won’t get so panicky if you can remember that.”

This novel is about neighbourliness in Portland, Oregon. Eddie Wilkens runs his own house-painting business ( a job Vlautin did in his thirties while trying to make it as a writer and musician). Eddie primes and refreshes the walls and windows of well-heeled locals, while covering up the cracks in his own façade; his wife has left him, his elderly dog, Early, is flatulent and his two painters- Houston (an alcoholic romantic) and Cordarrel ( a pedantic know-it-all) are slowly whittling away his patience.  Forty-something and living alone, he just wants to take life one day at a time. When his eight-year-old neighbour, barely coping with the violence of his older brother Curtis – who has just got his teenage girlfriend pregnant- and a largely absent single mother who works at night shifts as a stripper. Russell, starts hanging around Eddie’s door step and finds a haven in the stability of Eddie’s life. He cleans Eddie’s paint brushes and looks after Early and Eddie makes sure that the boy eats properly and gets to school. As with many of the hardscrabble situations in Vlautin’s fiction, this tentative equilibrium proves awfully frail. This story touches on crime and punishment, the jagged edge of economics and the comedy of everyday life. Halfway through the novel, by which time the reader is firmly invested in the fate of this unlikely duo, the back stories of all the characters begins to emerge. The effect is similar to that point in rock music when the band kicks in after an acoustic introduction: emotions soar.

Vlautin’s signature blend of intimate lyricism and cinematic Americana- equal parts of Tom Watts and Robert Altman – it also explores the generational factors at play with the archetypal sensibilities of working-class American men in fiction: their inherited failings but also how they learn to take a punch and nourish one another with rough-hewn kindness.

Equal Parts heart wrenching and uplifting, The Left and the Lucky is a portrait of this unusual friendship- the ways hurt shatters people and the compassionate acts that can, maybe, hold some of those pieces together.

The Left and the Lucky by Willy Vlautin, Faber £16.99/Harper $26.99, 288 pages.