The Night Always Comes

Starred review from January 4, 2021
Taking a cue from classic noir, Vlautin (Don’t Skip Out on Me) offers a stunning, heartbreaking study of one woman’s struggle against fate and circumstance in an America that’s left her behind. The housing boom in Portland, Ore., has priced many working-class families out, but 30-year-old Lynette’s landlord offers her a good deal on the decrepit house she and her mother have been renting for years. Lynette works two jobs while caring for her developmentally disabled brother, Kenny, who also lives with them, and she has finally saved up enough for a down payment. All she needs is her mother to cosign on the loan. At the last minute her mother, exhausted by her own life of struggle and disappointment, backs out of the deal. Desperate, Lynette makes a last-ditch effort to buy the house herself. Along the way, a plot to steal a safe from a friend who owes Lynette money takes her into her dark past of mental illness, sexual abuse, and prostitution, and up against men who prey upon vulnerable women. This gritty page-turner sings with pitch-perfect prose, and Lynette’s desperation is palpable. Vlautin has achieved a brilliant synthesis of Raymond Carver and Jim Thompson. Agent: Lesley Thorne, Aitken Alexander Assoc.

Starred review from January 1, 2021

Set in contemporary Portland, OR, this latest by Vlautin (Don't Skip Out on Me) is filled with darkness. Lynette has scrimped for three years to save enough money for the down payment on the house she shares with her mentally impaired older brother and her hard-drinking, chain-smoking mother. Now, just when Lynette's plan is about to pay off, her mother tosses in a huge monkey wrench, forcing Lynette into the night and a series of life-threatening situations with the sketchiest characters imaginable. Her overnight odyssey brings her face-to-face not only with scummy people but also with a past not overfilled with happiness. This fairly short novel is structured in one continuous 48-hour flow, which makes it seem even shorter. The story resonates, with characters we come to feel we know and dialog that is so natural we hear it, not just read it. Lynette may be, as her mother says, "just born to fail." But in spite of everything that has gone wrong for her, in the end she is not defeated. Though alone in the world by story's end, she departs home without bitterness, heading east toward the rising sun. VERDICT This is literary art that will keep readers in their seats until the last page.--Michael Russo, Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2021
Need propels a heroine's long night of the soul. Vlautin's fiction is full of working-class strugglers doing their best to survive a rapidly changing country. Most of them, including the protagonists of his propulsive new novel, have been priced out of comfortable living, or even stability. And so they turn to unsavory means to get by. This book plays out like a modern noir take on a Tennessee Williams play, its desperate characters harboring old resentments, its hard-luck heroine settling scores throughout a long, bloody night in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. Thirty-year-old Lynette wants to buy the run-down rental house she shares with her embittered mother and her developmentally challenged brother. But she needs cash, especially after her mom's most recent starburst of irresponsibility. She's owed money around town, and it's time to collect--and then some. Vlautin's supporting characters--meth-heads and pimps, waitresses and mechanics--occupy a rung of society that rarely gets its story told in any kind of convincing way. His language is always vivid. Here's Lynette studying a tweaker: "Bursting red blisters ran from the back of his neck, around his left ear, and completely engulfed his left eye and forehead. He was young, in his twenties, but his teeth had gone bad and his eyes looked pushed into his head like an old man's." Such is the company that Lynette comes to keep in her quest for an instant nest egg. Her nocturnal journey is gripping, but much of the book's power derives from more quotidian questions: Can I get a loan to make that down payment on the house? Can I balance that introduction to econ class with my two jobs? Will my car start? And what happened to my city? "I'm realizing that the whole city is starting to haunt me," Lynette tells a friend. "And all the new places, all the big new buildings, just remind me that I'm nothing, that I'm nobody." Vlautin has written a soulful thriller for the age of soulless gentrification. A working-class drama finds the grit beneath Portland's gentrification.

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February 15, 2021
Vlautin's emotionally wrenching tales of the working-class poor typically feature characters trapped in a deadly undertow of economic hardship, compounded by wrong choices made for the right reasons. So it is this time, as Vlautin moves from the country-noir landscape of Don't Skip Out on Me (2018) to the overlooked underclass in gentrifying, superhip Portland, Oregon. Thirty-year-old waitress Lynette has made plenty of wrong choices (drugs, alcohol, and men, among them), but she has remained focused on saving enough money (however ill-gotten) to buy the house where she lives with her mother and developmentally challenged brother. She's close to being there when her mother uses part of the money to buy a car, leaving the kitty short with the owner's deadline approaching. Desperate to make up the difference, Lynette embarks on a two-day rampage into the heart of darkness, culminating with an outlandish scheme to steal a safe. Vlautin never lets us forget that hovering over Lynette's Hail Mary pass at salvation is the spectre of gentrification: ""The whole city is starting to haunt me . . . all the new places, the big new buildings, just remind me that I'm nothing, that I'm nobody."" Her friend, Shirley, begs to differ: ""You never give up and you've got a good heart, a damaged heart, but a good heart."" We concur, of course, and race to the end to see if good hearts can maybe, just this once, make a difference. With Vlautin, you never know for sure.

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