The Night Always Comes by Willy Vlautin

Published by Harper on April 6, 2021

The Night Always Comes is a story of snowballing woe. At the age of thirty, Lynette is a fundamentally decent person who has, so far, survived a troubled life. She has anger management issues. When she was young, she tried to commit suicide. She left home to avoid being assaulted by her mother’s boyfriend. Her unstable mental health resulted in a hospitalization. Her choice of men has not been healthy.

The Portland Lynette knows is changing, but so is Lynette. She feels a darkness inside her that she is learning to keep contained. She takes care of her mentally disabled brother. She tries not to hurt people and she regrets the pain she has caused. Her friend Shirley tells Lynette that “you never give up, you’ve got a good heart, a damaged heart, but a good heart, and you want to do good.” That pretty well sums her up.

Lynette has made serious efforts to clean up her life. She works hard at a bakery although she earns extra cash through prostitution. She saves money because she wants to help her mother buy the crappy house that they’ve been renting. Despite soaring property values, the owner is willing to give them a deal. Lynette is sure they’ll never find a nearby dwelling that they can afford to rent if the owner sells it to someone else. The novel’s central conflict arises when Lynette learns that her mother is having second thoughts, or is only now sharing her thoughts, about the family’s future.

Lynette and her mother have long and difficult conversations during the novel’s two-day span. Lynette’s mother uses her constant exhaustion as an excuse to avoid unpleasant discussions, but Lynette and her mother eventually air their grievances and may, for the first time, begin to understand each other. Lynette might not be able to understand her mother’s selfishness, but her mother has been through a good bit of pain, some of it inflicted by Lynette during her teen years. Lynette’s mother is depressed, on the verge of giving up because she’s sure her life will never be better, no matter what she does. She has an irrational resentment of street people because, in her view, they don’t need to pay rent and they get free health care. Lynette, by contrast, sees the possibility of a better future that her mother refuses to embrace.

The story takes Lynette into some hairy situations. She steals a car, not to keep it but because its owner pissed her off. She steals a safe to collect money from a friend who refuses to repay a loan. She enlists the aid of a former boyfriend who tries to rip her off. She acquires some drugs and tries to sell them to a dealer who tries to rip her off. Lynette’s resourcefulness and determination keep her alive as she jumps from one precarious moment to another, yet it seems like only a matter of time before her actions catch up with her.

Willy Vlautin’s prose combines grit and elegance to shine a spotlight on Portland’s underbelly. While gentrification is moving the poor and the drug addicted out of their old haunts, the gentrified are seen only from a distance. Apart from a scene with a finance wizard who has been paying Lynette for sex — he dumps her when she asks him for free advice — people with money and stable lives occupy a world that does not welcome people like Lynette.

The plot serves to keep the story moving, but it is secondary to Lynette’s confrontations with her mother. Their dialog reflects the hesitancy of two people who never learned how to talk to each other, who don’t believe the other really wants to listen. The reader sees both characters in depth, two damaged women who have damaged each other. It is easy to feel sympathy for both of them, although it is easier to cheer for Lynette, simply because she hasn’t given up. By the novel’s end, Lynette doesn’t know where her life will go — no one does — but she knows she needs to take control of it. The reader can only admire her for persevering.

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