Review

Northline

By Willy Vlautin

Published by Faber

‘She was drunk when she closed her bank account, and drunk when she got on the city bus to her mother’s house.

'Sweat dripped from her face as she sat on the plastic bus seat. She stared out the window and the city passed before her. With each building she passed, she was more certain.’

As grim a slice of Americana as you are likely to read this year, Northline is a profoundly affecting novel and a quiet hymn to the virtues of persistence in the face of despair.

The endemic violence in the book is more than matched by the humanity of Vlautin’s vision, which searches for hope in the most run-down of so-called ordinary lives. And although Northline is about specific characters, it can easily be read as a tale of Everymen and Everywomen, millions of whom find themselves adrift, far from the comforting embrace of the American dream. This feeling of universality is enhanced by the fact that we don’t even find out the main character’s name – Allison – until page 45.

A thin, nervous 22-year-old with a drink problem, Allison is stuck in a relationship with a man who has no qualms about handcuffing her to a bed for ten hours to punish her for passing out on him the night before. A further humiliation at an all-night party in the desert and the discovery that she is pregnant prove to be the catalysts that make her leave town to seek a new life elsewhere.

Unhappy and alone, given to protracted crying fits and drunken jags in dark bars, Allison nevertheless begins to take control of her life and, as importantly, grow to like herself more. With the help of a few kind people and several random acts of kindness, she very gradually starts to build relationships based on trust and friendship rather than dependence.

Like Vlautin’s previous novel, The Motel Life, Northline is a low-key but dignified portrait of middle American lives gone wrong. Both feature the Nevada city of Reno and other more run-down towns in the same state, where the hopeless and hopeful alike fritter away their money on the casino slots and card tables. Vlautin is fond of embellishing the margins of his stories with light sketches, explicitly so in The Motel Life, in which Frank makes up stories for his brother, but also more subtly in Northline, where we learn small facts about the most peripheral characters.

Northline is (marginally) the more finely crafted of the novels, expanding upon themes in The Motel Life with careful and tender subtlety. Vlautin is the lead singer in the band Richmond Fontaine, whose melancholic songs are the perfect vehicle for Vlautin’s maudlin lyrics. His prose writing, not surprisingly, has the same feel to it, which makes his (and Paul Brainard's) CD of instrumental music that comes with the novel the ideal accompaniment to the raw yet tender portrait of Allison’s struggle against the vicissitudes of everyday life.

Reviewed by James Smith, Booktrust website editor

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