The Night Always Comes

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The tone and pace was uneven. 2/3 of the novel are so action-filled that it's like reading a thriller. The melancholic and slower pace I normally appreciate about Vlautin only appear in the rest of the novel. All the parts about the main character's earlier life, especially the love story, were so much better than the rest. I wanted to read a whole novel about that tragic love story; I found it so moving. but other people get to have dreams, too, and her mother suddenly wants to carve out a different future for herself, one that doesn't involve living in a house with so many bad memories, and one that doesn't involve living with lynette anymore. she announces that she's made other arrangements and the rest of the book is a real-time scramble as lynette tries to wrangle enough money to buy the house on her own. You cease to distinguish between right and wrong. You can no longer see clearly what is good and what is bad." it's a modest dream, but to her it represents stability, which she has had precious little of in her thirty years. His sixth novel to date, published in 2021, The Night Always Comes is arguably his most affecting, and without doubt will leave indelible marks.

Not dissimilar to his previous five novels, Vlautin's deftness in making his characters so impacting is remarkable. Just as in Lean on Pete, in which we become impassioned with the vulnerable Charley, or the tragedy surrounding Horace in Don't Skip Out on Me, here our central character Lynette is equally ineffaceable. Is there an intense focus on a character with mental health issues who honestly can't always control herself and makes some highly questionable moves? Yes. (And don't expect her to explain to you why she made them.) Vlautin is a master at showing, taking us through the events of a harrowing few days in Lynette’s life. What he chooses to show, and how clearly he shows it, gives us a very vibrant, if dark, picture of her life, and the limitations and challenges she faces from the outside world. One running comment is on the mass of construction underway. This place sold its parking lot for an apartment development. Another condo-building is going up here, more over there. Formerly recognizable neighborhoods have been transformed into yuppie-vortex.An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored. The Irish Times - Willy Vlautin: ‘You try to make something that is a story, and is about life, but also says something that matter - by Ellen Battersby But when Lynette’s mother reneges on the deal, that dream disappears in an instant. Lynette spirals, and most of the novel takes place over a single night as she tears feverishly through Portland, chasing down any lead that might result in some extra cash that could right the situation. Most of the people Lynette meets on this tragic, desperate night do not react kindly, and as the evening turns violent the exhaustion and isolation of her poverty ring clear as day. I used to always ask myself, Why would a man in his twenties want to live on the street when he could work? The answer is: why not? Why should they bust their ass all day when they know no matter what they do they'll never get ahead?' The main issue with a Willy Vlautin novel is that it has to end. Here is another phenomenal book that unnerves, disquiets and makes you wince as his prose stabs at you violently with unhinged fervour.

Three woman who join together to rent a large space along the beach in Los Angeles for their stores—a gift shop, a bakery, and a bookstore—become fast friends as they each experience the highs, and lows, of love. And are they victims? In a way. In that they are all victims of being losers in the American dream who see no other option but screwing anybody and everybody however they can to (in their eyes) even the scales with fate. Willy Vlautin is not known for happy endings, but there’s something here that defies the downward pull. In the end, Lynette is pure life force: fierce and canny and blazing through a city that no longer has space for her, and it’s all Portland’s loss.”—Portland Monthly Magazine

Media Reviews

A book trailer which shows some of the locations mentioned in The Night Always Comes can be seen here. A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism. Life is beyond tough for Lynette, as she works numerous low-paid jobs while looking after her disabled brother and hapless mother in an impoverished area of Portland, Oregon. She embarks on a desperate and perilous journey of ambition and misery in the hope for a better life.

fulfilling my 2021 goal to read one book each month by an author i have never read despite owning more than one of their books. The Delines are a soul country band from Portland, Oregon formed in 2015 with four previous studio albums to their name. Willy Vlautin is the songwriter for the band and previously with Richmond Fontaine with over 15 albums released and UK, European wide fans where they tour regularly.In a neighborhood that once was labeled as a poor urban area, has been changed through gentrification. A very controversial topic with the influx of more affluent residents and businesses changing the facade of the area and displacing many of the ones that were already having a difficult time surviving.

The novel, Vlautin’s sixth, stalls out during its many long monologues spelling out exactly what each character is thinking in clunky detail. Vlautin’s etchings of the city’s poor, white population are at times overwrought, especially around the topic of weight, as are the inner lives of anyone who’s not the main character. That tendency is extra egregious when it comes to Lynette’s mother, a dreary antagonist whose motives no number of monologues manage to three-dimensionalize.I do not travel in intellectual circles and I do not have the opportunity to speak with individuals who have a great interest in reading. Therefore my personal experience may be skewed. However I am beginning to feel that Willie Vlautin is one of the best modern American writers of fiction that I NEVER hear anyone speak about. I accidentally came upon him when reading a novel by George Pelecanos, “The Man Who Came Uptown”. This was different than anything I’ve read before. It’s hard for me to explain. It was detailed and interesting and each person was complex. This author showed me so much with his words. How he said them. The way he brought the characters to life. I had to finished it in one day. I was intrigued. I wanted closer and I couldn’t put it down. Lynette clearly suffers from depression, probably drug and alcohol-induced. Her obsession is a kind of therapy, I suppose, that keeps her mind off her condition… until it doesn’t. Unaccountably, at that point she decides to do a clear out of her house before skipping town ahead of a posse of folk who’d like to string her up. Set over two days and two nights, The Night Always Comes follows Lynette’s frantic search—an odyssey of hope and anguish that will bring her face to face with greedy rich men and ambitious hustlers, those benefiting and those left behind by a city in the throes of a transformative boom. As her desperation builds and her pleas for help go unanswered, Lynette makes a dangerous choice that sets her on a precarious, frenzied spiral. In trying to save her family’s future, she is plunged into the darkness of her past, and forced to confront the reality of her life.