“I think what I was interested in the most was how people find a reason to keep going,” author Willy Vlautin said of his heart-wrenching new novel, “The Free.”

The reader first meets Leroy, a brain-damaged former soldier who, during one of his few lucid moments, attempts suicide in the shabby, Washington state group home in which he eventually landed after rehabilitation efforts.

Freddie McCall, who works nights in the home, has the bad luck of waking to discover Leroy. He visits Leroy in the hospital, but has plenty of troubles of his own. He owes alimony payments and is plagued with debt, and he spends his days as a clerk in a paint store, working two jobs in a desperate attempt to keep his head above the rising financial waters that threaten to sweep everything away.

Pauline Hawkins is a nurse in the hospital where Leroy is a patient. Her work revolves around caregiving, and in her off time she also tends to her ailing father. As a result, she builds emotional walls between herself and other people.

“‘The Free’ started out as a distress call to the patron saint of nurses,” explained Vlautin, who will make two Central Oregon appearances in the week ahead.

“Will you remember Leroy, the soldier with the brain injury? Will you remember guys like Freddie, who’s drowning in medical bills because his daughter was born with disabilities and he has a bad health plan? And will you remember the nurse who’s beat up, and she can’t help but take her (work) home with her?”

These three characters are saddled with enough that they’d make Kurt Vonnegut proud were he around to read it. Vonnegut once made a list of eight rules of writing, and “The Free” seems to be in strict keeping with No. 6: “Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they’re made of.”

Vlautin, who lives outside of Portland, had no shortage of inspiration from which to draw in conceiving what happens to his characters.

“It was all subjects that would wake me up in the middle of the night, thinking about, and worrying about,” he said. “I was a house painter for years, and there was a guy at the paint store — those are jobs where you aren’t going to hit a big payday; there’s no big promotion in a job like that — and his kid was born with disabilities. I could just see, it was like adding a 50-pound weight on his back.”

Also a singer-songwriter who leads the alt-country band Richmond Fontaine, Vlautin has written three other novels. His 2006 debut, “The Motel Life,” was made into a 2013 film starring Emile Hirsch and Dakota Fanning.

A study that made headlines last fall everywhere from Scientific American to Slate.com 
found a link between reading literary fiction and developing empathy. Readers of “The Free” will likely feel a pull of empathy for Leroy, Pauline and Freddie.

We wondered if putting his characters through their struggles was in a sense hard for — and hard on — Vlautin.

“It is taxing, that’s for sure. A guy like Freddie whose back is to the wall, who’s lost and drowning when we meet him, was tough. He wore me out,” Vlautin said. “He doesn’t get much help, no breaks or vacations from it. But most people don’t.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0349, djasper@bendbulletin.com

If you go

What: Readings by author Willy Vlautin

Details:

• 6 p.m. Wednesday at Downtown Bend Public Library, 601 N.W. Wall St. Contact: lizg@deschutes
library.org, 541-312-1032

• 5 p.m. Saturday at 
Sunriver Books & Music, 57060 Abbot Drive. 
Contact: sunriverbooks.com, 
541-593-2525