Willy Vlautin’s protagonists have a harder time than most. Over the trajectory of his five previous novels, from the Flanagan brothers on the run in his 2006 debut The Motel Life, to lonely ranch hand-come-aspirant boxer Horace Hopper in 2018’s Don’t Skip Out On Me, the world wasn’t exactly made for these marginalised characters.
Now we have Lynette, a pastry chef/bartender/escort/part-time community college accountancy student from Portland, Oregon, who is cast from a similarly self-sabotaging mould. (Although it can be argued that it is a mercilessly acquisitive societal system which keeps all of them in an endless cycle of hand-to-
mouth alienation as much as it is the consequence of personal misfortune or individual psychology.)
Lynette (30) has been saddled with Doreen, her tired, defeated mother; a long departed alcoholic father, who she only ever sees when he comes to cadge free drinks from her at the bar; and Kenny, her developmentally challenged brother, two years her senior, for whom she is the chief caregiver. She also has a history of abuse and trauma at the hands of Doreen’s former boyfriend Randy, which caused her to run away from home when she was 16. The dark memories of this are manifested even in the midst of happiness with her beautiful ex-boyfriend Jack.
Now Doreen has reneged on a plan for them to get a mortgage to buy the house they rent (by buying an expensive car), which, amid astronomical rents and lack of credit, Lynette sees as their last chance to stay in the city before their landlord sells. So she embarks on a night-town odyssey, encountering various lowlifes to call in some longstanding debts, which imbues the novel with the noirish urgency of a page-turning thriller.
We may be suffering a housing crisis in this country, but the ideological disease of greed that sponsors it – where people no longer speak of “my house”, let alone “my home”, but instead “my property”, and the unattainability of home ownership and the rise in homelessness which follow the accumulation of “rental properties” – is imported from that beacon of neoliberal capitalism, the US.
Portland, like Dublin, is pushing its working class out to new estates in peripheral towns, resulting in the evisceration of a city. When Lynette says, “The whole city is starting to haunt me. All the new places, all the big new buildings, just remind me that I’m nothing, that I’m nobody”, we can relate, as we walk by yet another new hotel or student accommodation, juxtaposed with tent dwellers along the canals, in our own capital.
Frank Kermode wrote of one of Vlautin’s avowed influences, Raymond Carver, “[his] fiction is so spare in manner that it takes time before one realises how completely a whole culture and a whole moral condition is represented by even the most seemingly slight sketch”. It is no longer true to say that Vlautin is better known as a singer-songwriter, formerly with alt.country band Richmond Fontaine and now with exceptional country soul outfit The Delines. His reputation as a novelist has now exceeded that achieved in his initial creative outlet. But he brings the same eye for detail and knack for the telling phrase already displayed in his lyrics to his prose fiction, where one seemingly innocuous line can reveal so much.
Vlautin’s staked-out territory remains the hardscrabble lives of America’s underclass (or squeezed middles), those lost or lonely or rootlessly marginalised blue-collar folks whom college-educated, upper middle-class Americans typically dismiss as losers or white trash. In his latest book he continues to mine the terse, laconic, Hemingwayesque tradition in American letters, a seam whose subsequent practitioners include Carver, Denis Johnson and Nelson Algren.
A late revelation from sympathetic co-worker Shirley about Doreen’s character reinforces our intuition that Lynette is better off cutting loose from her family and trying to make a life for herself, however painful it is for her to leave Kenny behind, even temporarily. It is not for nothing that Willy always signs his books “Good luck always”, in pointedly unironic contrast to that ominous admonition “May the odds be ever in your favour”.
The odds are never in his characters’ favour (just as they never favour participants in the Hunger Games), but as she drives eastward out of town at the conclusion of this harrowing tale, we can hope that Lynette’s journey to the end of the night might lead to a new dawn.
