The Night Always Comes by Willy Vlautin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Failure To Launch

I’m not sure how author/songwriter/bandleader, Willy Vlautin, wants us to perceive his protagonist, Lynette, an early thirties three-job hustler. Courageous? Hapless? Victim? Self-sacrificing? Psychotic? Or a representative of a class that is systematically being ground down by the success of others?

Lynette is most certainly unlucky. A narcissistic mother, exploitative father, severely mentally disabled brother, as well as several frenemies who try to do her in one way or another constitute her social milieu. She’s like the Peanuts cartoon character, Pigpen, raising the dust of chaos wherever she goes.

We get to know a lot about the topography of Portland Oregon, and gig posters for small-time local bands, but very little about Lynette’s logical processes. Perhaps she has none. Obsessed with a desire to move up the social ladder to middle-class home ownership, she is committed to hard work… along with prostitution, grand theft, burglary, drug-dealing, and GBH. Lynette apparently never thinks about consequences but merely reacts impulsively to anything beyond her obsession.

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.

By then the reader is forced to recognise the truth: Lynette is basically stupid - not just uneducated but really thick. Perhaps everything else in her life is a consequence of that. No one with any common sense would do or agree to the things she does after being betrayed by everyone she knows. Whether this stupidity is a result of genetics, environment of the frequent shots of Jägermeister is unclear. But she leaves home with a piece of homely advice from mom who seems to come to the same conclusion and is tired of having her around: “Isn’t that the American dream? Fuck over whoever is in your way and get what you want.”

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