Northline by Willy Vlautin

Vlautin’s The Motel Life and Lean on Pete are both heart-wincing novels about downtrodden young people who make mistakes, struggle, and somehow come out alright in the end. Northline is no different.

Northline is the story about a 23-year-old waitress named Allison who dropped out of high school and is dating a Neo-Nazi jerk in Las Vegas. When she finds herself to be pregnant, she forces herself to leave Vegas and her abusive boyfriend to go to Reno, where she gives the baby up for adoption. There she tries to move on with her life and to rise above her dark past with a little help from an overweight divorced woman and a hallucination of Paul Newman.

What Allison leaves behind in Las Vegas is a history of drinking, getting raped, being locked in her boyfriend’s trunk, and having a swastika tattooed on her while she was half-passed out. Her younger sister seems to be following in her footsteps while her mom watches television.

Vlautin has a very simple writing style, he tells the story in a “this is how it is” fashion, he doesn’t dress it up with flowery language or gratuitous details. It’s this writing style that makes his characters seem even more real, and the gritty lives they lead all the more believable. He sets his scenes up the same way, using sparse details but just enough to develop a setting easy to imagine. Reno is filled with bars and casinos while the air is filled with lowlifes and smoke. There’s no glamour in running away from home the way Vlautin describes it, and no beauty in Allison’s weakness. Even so, it’s easy to empathize with Allison and her self-loathing and self-destructive nature.

What I also love about this novel is Vlautin’s use of dialogue. All of the characters speak to each other in a very blunt and honest way, even when they are lying to each other. Dark secrets will be easily and succinctly revealed, and reactions to those secrets will be a shrug of the shoulders. For example, Dan, one of Allison’s regulars at the restaurant she works at, tells her that he is afraid of people his own age because a group of guys his age once beat him almost to death for no reason. Allison barely bats an eye at this revelation and merely tells him that she understands.

Northline is a great read, chopped up into short chapters for easy reading. It also includes an interview with the author and a short explanation on how this story came to be.