“It All Comes Together” in … Reno?: Confronting the Postwestern Geographic Imaginary in Willy Vlautin’s The Motel Life

This reading of Willy Vlautin’s The Motel Life (2006) reconsiders local meaning-making and practice in the context of recent postwestern spatial productions that emphasize western space as globally routed and interconnected. Frequently, the postwestern condition is situated as manifold and unsettled in its production, unstable in its condition, and it reflects a mobility extensive with postmodernity at large rather than the expected, formulaic—read pejorative—provincialism of past conceptions. Still, Vlautin’s novel exudes a deliberate, almost claustraphobic sense of the American post-West as a fixed, hermetic locale. This essayclaims that Vlautin’s variation on the production of postwestern space compels us to assess whether we overstate the everyday cultural impact of postnational interdependence on the majority of average westerners.