Northline - Softcover

Willy Vlautin's Northline tells the story of Allison Johnson, a young, pregnant woman who leaves her abusive neo-Nazi boyfriend, goes to Reno, sells her baby and tries to get her life in order by working at a casino. She's a pathetic case, a blackout drunk who never does anything mean to anyone but gets taken advantage of frequently. Still, she meets a number of people who help her out, and she finally hooks up with a kindred soul, someone as hapless as she.

Vlautin's other characters are not high-rollers. They're Allison's sweaty apartment superintendent, a kindly truck-stop waitress, deformed casino nighthawks, a compassionate truck driver whose child has been killed, drunks, janitors and Mexican-hating skinheads. Like Dagoberto Gilb and Marc Watkins, Vlautin shows us people who, if they have jobs at all, do the dirty work, scratching out livings in the depths of society.

In an interview appended to Northline, Vlautin claims Steinbeck as his primary literary influence, and it shows. Like his mentor, Vlautin has no truck with subtleties, and his literary machinery often groans like a rusted Model T. For instance, when Vlautin senses that the reader needs to get into Allison's head, he provides her with a notepad so she can write confessional notes to herself (and us).

What redeems Vlautin's work is that his objective isn't to produce belles lettres, but to tell the stories of America's underclass, as he did in his first novel, The Motel Life. The brutal events that are so frequent for his characters are rendered with chilling nonchalance. When Allison is raped, beaten and left injured and handcuffed to her boyfriend's bed, Vlautin reports the facts as if they are just everyday occurrences. After Allison passes out drunk in a bathroom while having sex with her boyfriend, Vlautin writes, "He looked at her, at the blood again leaking, dripping from the cut. He saw the small pool of urine around her, and he kicked her. Just once, but as hard as he could, with his steel-toed boots. Kicked her in the leg, above the knee. Still she didn't move, so he reached down for her clothes and began dressing her."

That's the kind of life Allison lives. Willy Vlautin tells her story with unrelenting clarity, and although the novel ends with her at relative peace, the next day is likely to deliver another disaster. Northline serves as a reminder that America's beaten, broke and miserable are not necessarily morally bankrupt or clueless victims. They're just trying to get by on minimal resources, little education and a bit of hope.

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