Portland trio chase the American dream

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/05/2021 (1959 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

To what lengths will you go to hold onto a dream?

That question is at the heart of The Night Always Comes, the latest from Portland, Ore.-based novelist and musician Willy Vlautin.

When Lynette, a 30-year-old who works two jobs and then some to get by, has the chance to buy the 100-year-old house she, her mother and developmentally disabled older brother call home, she puts everything she has and more into achieving the goal. Part of her drive comes from trying to make amends for the hurt she has caused her mother over the years, while at the same time allowing her family to remain together in the only home they’ve ever known.

The papers are almost signed when her mother unexpectedly backs out of the deal. Desperation kicks in, and Lynette spends the next 48 hours calling in bad debts and trying to make the most of a handful of increasingly shady deals across the ever-wet backstreets and cold, dark corners of the Rose City.

Vlautin, who has won Oregon Book Awards for his novels Lean on Pete and The Free, is a master of dialogue who excels at creating down-on-their-luck characters who won’t give up, no matter what it costs them. In Lynette and her mother, Vlautin has created two vibrant women whose stubborn personalities contain contradictions, whose decisions are informed both by trauma and hope.

“What am I supposed to do?” Lynette’s mother pleads at a crucial point. “Go to college? Learn about computers? I’m old. So I guess I’m what you’d call a loser… Jesus, I’m a loser. But knowing it doesn’t change anything.”

Place has always played an important factor in Vlautin’s writing, so much so that the reader would be wise to consider Portland itself as a character in The Night Always Comes — one who, like Lynette, is beholden to the forces of capital.

“This city is changing so much so fast that I don’t know what to think,” Lynette tells her mother after spending the night driving throughout Portland. “There are streets I went to as a kid that don’t look anything like they did… We’re gonna get pushed out if we don’t buy.”

Yet while Vlautin’s Portland is resigned to its ongoing gentrification, Lynette has agency, which she makes full use of in pursuing her goal. The choices Lynette makes in The Night Always Comes lead her to reckon with her own morals, and put her safety at risk again and again.

But throughout, Lynette’s remains true to herself, and she is able to keep her street-smart wits about her, despite finding herself in increasingly dodgy situations. These choices keep the plot moving at a brisk clip throughout, while the moral and ethical dilemmas involved in navigating late-stage capitalism as a working-class person are so palpable the reader cannot help but feel crushed, like Lynette, under their weight.

The Night Always Comes is an engaging, empathetic northwest noir that grapples with the question of whether the American dream is still achievable for anyone living and working on the margins, or whether it’s been a lie going back all the way to when the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock.

Sheldon Birnie is a writer and reporter in Winnipeg.