Dents and Scars | An Interview with Willy Vlautin
Interviews
By William Boyle
Lynette is the main character of The Night Always Comes, Willy Vlautin’s newest novel. She’s scraping by with three jobs, living with her mother and developmentally disabled brother in a Portland, Oregon they barely recognize anymore. Rents are out of control. Affluence has come to town. They’ve been living in the same shitty house forever. The landlord is finally letting it go, agreeing to sell it to them for a decent price. Lynette has bad credit and has to rely on her mother for the loan. When her mother backs out at the last second, Lynette is sent into a desperate spiral. She starts digging up old ghosts, hunting for hope, and seeking compassion in a city that wants to spit her out. The result is a sympathetic portrait of a shattered woman trying to piece herself together again.
Vlautin has always been a great place writer, and The Night Always Comes finds him at the peak of his powers. It immediately joins the list of best novels set in Portland, right up there with Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling and Kent Anderson’s Night Dogs. There’s also lots to say about how this book tackles the issues of class and wealth inequality and the death of the American Dream: the notion that owning something matters, that working hard enough means you can live honestly and be fulfilled. What happens when people see that there’s an elaborate con at work; that the rich just keep getting richer and the poor get chased into bad deals and bad loans and bad houses and bad lives until they disappear? Lynette is one of those people and, through her, we see exactly what happens when people buy into being fed a lie until there’s no lie left to believe.
Yet The Night Always Comes is ultimately a novel about goodness—about living with a code of decency as notions of decency and kindness crumble all around us. Vlautin brings the hope like only he can. I’m beyond glad I got the chance to talk to him about his novel.
William Boyle: The Night Always Comes is a terrific place novel. It seems like it started with you wanting to write about Portland.
Willy Vlautin: When I moved to Portland in the ’90s, it was really cheap to live here and all of these musicians, artists, writers, and weirdos from all the small towns in the West were moving to the city. It was a pretty magical place. You could work a menial job and, with one roommate, you could afford living in a house that had a basement so you could hold band practice there. I was a housepainter for years, and I bought a house in a really nice neighborhood for $70,000. It was a derelict 485-square-foot house, so it was a tiny little mother-in-law house, but I could do it. Then, in the last five years, you’d be driving through downtown Portland and you’d notice anywhere from ten to fifteen cranes, meaning ten to fifteen new buildings going up. You’d notice all these old places getting knocked down and condos or apartment buildings going up. Whole neighborhoods would change within a year or two. It would be this huge shift, where they’d tear down these old places and build these condos with shopping centers below them.
St. John’s, which is a really old working-class part of Portland, is where I have an office. I’d always take walks around there and dream about houses I wanted to live in. These are two bedroom Craftsman houses, built from the ’20s to the ’50s for working-class people. You’d start noticing those houses going from $200,000 to $400,000 or $500,000. In the last fifteen years, housing prices have quadrupled and wages have only gone up once. I started noticing that and wondering who’s building all these condominiums. At the same time, you’re seeing an explosion of tent cities everywhere. There are five tents outside my building right now. They’re all guys under forty living in them. They’re barbecuing on an old hibachi grill. Down the street there’s a line of broken-down RVs, surrounded by all these businesses that are closed, mom-and-pop shops that sold out for money. Portland is so logjammed with permits that these buildings sit vacant for a long time while they’re waiting to tear them down and build something new.
I was so shocked by all of this, and it was so distressing and intense that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I thought, “Man, I would’ve just gotten swept away. If I was just working a job here and I couldn’t afford a house, I would’ve just gotten swept away.” There’s no way I could’ve bought a house in Portland now. Paying $400,000 or $500,000 for a beat-up house in a so-so neighborhood is pretty scary. So, that’s what got me started thinking about this novel.
WB: Did the characters come after that or did it come together all at once? Did you imagine Lynette and just insert her into this situation, where everything was changing around her? Her panic partly born of the fact that she’d grown up in one place and it had become something else?
WV: I thought about President Trump’s quote, “The point is you can’t be too greedy.” He was talking about business deals, but so much of America is about capitalism and making money. And you see this in Portland. They’re destroying the thing they love. Portland is a really great city, and it’s a great city for the same reasons it was a great city before they started putting up so much housing so close and not thinking about cars or parking or where they’re going to house working-class people.
So, I started thinking about it cynically. If CEOs and the Donald Trumps of America say greed is OK and greed is the most important thing, then how does that look at the bottom? If you say that the idea of wealth over community is good, then this is how it looks at the bottom. Lynette still believes in community. She knows her and her family are going to get swallowed up by the city if she doesn’t get a little power. Her idea of power—which is an old American idea—is that if you have home ownership you have power. No one can kick you out. No one can tell you how to paint your house. It started with that, and then the dynamic in the family. I think all families are under duress, all families carry burdens, and I wanted to have a working-class family with a lot of burdens that now has the burden of gentrification. I wanted to see how they could survive.
WB: Can you talk a little bit about the origins of Lynette as a character? She’s thirty, and she feels kind of like kin to Allison Johnson in Northline, both in the ways she’s troubled and the ways she’s internalized trauma.
WV: I was thinking about anger, about being so powerless. People either explode or implode. Allison Johnson from Northline, she implodes. She drinks herself away from her problems. She gives into the problems. If someone’s trying to manipulate her, she lets them. Lynette’s kind of the opposite. She gives and gives and gives and when she can’t give anymore, she explodes. And that’s the only way she can get power back. I was interested in the idea that she was raised as a servant to her developmentally disabled brother, Kenny. It’s such a struggle for a single working mom with two kids to survive. Lynette was put in the position, at a very young age, of being her brother’s caretaker so her mom could go to work and they could get by.
I don’t think Lynette ever understood love or how to accept love or give love. She was left by her dad, and her mom was always trying to keep the boat from sinking. Lynette was damaged and she then fell into some rough stuff when she was in high school. When she ran away from home, she got under the thumb of a guy who took advantage of her. She’s really rough around the edges, a little more destructive and tougher than Allison.
WB: One of things I love about the book is that it’s about all of these things—gentrification, the death of working-class existence and certain American ideals, an overabundance of greed—but it’s also a great crime novel set-up. It’s rooted totally in the thing that draws me most to crime fiction: desperation. Right out of the gate you have a desperate character in a desperate situation, and everything she does is guided by having to respond to the desperate situation that she doesn’t want to be in but is suddenly in because of her mom’s impulsive decision. Also, the timeframe—a couple of days and nights—is so compressed that it really adds to the feeling of desperation and paranoia. Can you talk a little bit about desperation in the book?
WV: Lynette works two jobs—at a bakery and as a bartender—and she’s got a third illegal job. She’s not money-savvy enough to navigate a shifting economy that quickly, so her ideas are pretty basic: I’ll work more and sleep less. She can’t think outside that box, and that’s heartbreaking. It adds to the desperation because she’s also tired and she can’t think her way out of it. She’s just trying to figure out how she can come up with the money to buy the house. So, there’s that desperation.
And then there’s the fact that Lynette and her mom shouldn’t still be together. They’re only together for Kenny. Like so many families, if you push them too hard, they break. The mom’s feeling hopeless because they can buy this house they’ve rented for thirty years but that means she’ll be in debt for the rest of her life. She hates the house. It’s on the side of a freeway. So the mom buys an expensive car right before they’re supposed to sign the papers on the house as a way of breaking up with Lynette and saying to her, “I don’t believe in spending this much money on the house.” It’s her way of saying, “I want one shiny nice thing in my life before I die, and you’re going to take that away from me?” That leads Lynette on a more desperate path to come up with money.
Also, Lynette’s damaged. That’s why I like crime fiction, too. You take a damaged person and then you put desperation into them and it doesn’t end well. It hurts and it’s brutal. I’ve always been interested in that because, shit, I’m a bit ragged myself. I feel a lot more comfortable writing about that world than any other world.
WB: Your books generally skirt the edges of noir, but this book feels like your most straight-ahead noir in some ways.
WV: I was such a big fan of the Black Lizard books, but I’d never really gone down that road too far. I love Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, and David Goodis. I’ve always wanted to write those kinds of stories but without the crime element. Barry Gifford described it as psychologically damaged people writing about psychologically damaged people. Maybe that’s why I felt such comfort in these books at a really early age. I felt like these were really well-written and they were easy to understand, but they were written by really broken people about broken people. I finally said, “I found something that made more sense to me than a well-balanced writer telling a story about a broken person.” It took the edge off me, made me feel less alone in the world. That’s what’s always been my model of the kinds of things I like, and The Night Always Comes is the closest of my books to one of their novels.
WB: The structure reminded me a little of the Dardenne Brothers film, Two Days, One Night, another story where a woman is on a desperate mission. Did you know, going in, that your story would take place over this compressed period of time?
WV: I wanted it to be two books. Part one would be the two days and two nights. The second half would take place over a year, and it’d be Lynette after she leaves. The idea would’ve been to see if she could really survive on her own. But it didn’t work. I spent a year and a half stewing over it. I quit drinking for seven months. I started jogging again; I started doing yoga; I was trying to eat better. All that stuff to try to get my brain cells to fire a little bit better so I could figure it out. And I couldn’t figure it out. I kind of always knew I was going down the wrong path with the second part, so I cannibalized some of it and put it in the first section and then the book worked fine. For me, anyway.
I love the Dardenne Brothers. I didn’t think about that movie but maybe it came into my head subconsciously because I love it so much. I really related to the character of Sandra. She reminds me of myself. My mom was a lot like her too.
WB: The narration doesn’t tell us a lot about the past until it needs to. For example, the scene in the truck stop where Lynette thinks about Jack. We don’t know anything about him before then. We just hear his name here and there. There are other instances in the book like that, too. We don’t know much about Gloria until we meet Gloria. Same with JJ. Did you know you weren’t going to frontload this thing with background—that you were just going to drip this information in as we met these characters? What was the impact of writing it that way for you?
WV: Yeah, I wanted it to be like you’re learning more as you go along. You meet her and you think of her as one thing and you realize that there’s a whole lot going on underneath that’s caused her to be this way. In Lynette’s first big argument with her mom, who wants to break up with her, her mom starts throwing out these cruel things about her past. You don’t really know what’s going on. I wanted it to be, as you got more involved with her, that—like you do when you first meet somebody—you start seeing what makes them tick, their dents and scars. That was a struggle because it’s an action-driven book and I’d never written something that happened in that intense, noir sort of way. It took moving a lot of pieces around. I had to cut the Jack chapter down from sixty pages to about eighteen because it was too much and it pulled you out. That’s probably my favorite part of the book—the part with Jack—because I was really interested in how the traumatized and beat-up can really wreak havoc on people who aren’t as beat-up. Jack’s a pretty decent, cool guy, but he’s thrown into the deep end with a woman and he doesn’t know her history, all the trauma she’s been through. It really beats him up and scars him. And it wrecks Lynette as well.
WB: That’s also one of my favorite parts. Where it happens structurally is so good because most of the book is Lynette encountering bad men. So, if we’d known that stuff earlier about Jack, it might not have worked in the same way. Since it comes so late, there’s an extra layer of both relief and heartbreak because we come to understand she has known good men like her grandfather and Jack. Learning about Jack—that she lost him, that she didn’t have to lose him—hits especially hard at that point. And then she’s thinking about all the stuff that haunts her in Portland. It all piles up on Lynette: what’s she’s lost, what her city has lost.
WV: If you’ve suffered a lot in a place, there’s a scale. Lynette could probably survive it if she gets the house and starts feeling good about herself. She could probably put her past in a box and put some bricks on top of it and it won’t come out and bite her except once in a while. But if she fails with the house too then she’s failed at everything and the city just becomes too much. As she drives through the night and stops at all these different places, she realizes all the bad stuff that’s happened to her and the bad things she’s done. And, you’re right, it’s a rough book on men.
WB: Rough but accurate. On that note, the cataloging of the bad men in this book reminded me of your song “The Boyfriends.” None of these guys are one-dimensionally bad, which makes you even more angry about them. Lynette has these moments with JJ, Rodney, Cody, and her dad where they seem almost good, or their humanity comes through for a minute. Very quickly, for one reason or another (usually because they betray her), you realize they’re no good at all. Can you talk about writing humanity into these bad men?
WV: Lynette’s mom is pretty hard on men, and she has a right to be. She’s raised Lynette to be wary. There’s a lot of deep-seated distrust and hatred. As Lynette’s mom says, “They say the only way to find a good man is to have been raised by a good man, but that didn’t work for me because my dad was great but still I chose your dad, who was a really bad guy.”
But when I was writing about these guys, I was thinking more about greed and opportunism. If America is about opportunism, if socialism is the devil, if we don’t believe in a community that’s not based in religion, this is what society looks like. You have the old money of Portland: the guy she meets in the fancy hotel. You have the new money: the IT guy. You meet the working-class guy, which is her dad. He’s already been kicked out of his house and is living in a bad neighborhood, but he’s excited because he’s making so much money that he can buy a boat and his girlfriend has free healthcare and he’s stealing cable from his neighbors. He’s short-sighted.
One of the things I can’t get over is people in power taking advantage of people not in power. It’s always been a hard thing for me to stomach—to see which kind of people take advantage of other people. For a guy who was raised by a woman who had a lot of grievances against men, I guess that’s just in my blood. “The Boyfriends” is one of the only truly autobiographical songs I’ve ever written because those guys pissed me off so much.
WB: You don’t just write about greed as a hunger for money—you write about greed as a vice that’s baked into American identity. There’s definitely a through line in the book about all these failed systems or these systems that have failed people, most often through greed. Like Lynette going broke trying to see a therapist.
WV: I’m always very interested in healthcare. Lynette makes too much money to get free healthcare in Oregon, but if you don’t make very much money in Oregon you can get free healthcare. This is also interesting because disability and working under the table jobs are the new welfare, right? So, if you work hard but your employer doesn’t give you healthcare, it’s like a mortgage. I was interested in that idea of Lynette’s mom saying, “There’s no point, we’re not smart enough people to navigate buying an expensive house. We’ll never be able to eat at these fancy restaurants. We’ll never be able to buy a $5,000 couch. The only answer we have is to do the opposite, which is to see how much we can get from the government, see what kind of loopholes we can slip through, so we can get what we need to get by without trying too hard. Because why try hard? It’s pointless.” Now, that’s the mom and she’s very cynical. I’m always interested in that line. I was raised to never take if you don’t need it. That’s greed on a whole different level.
WB: Does that factor into Lynette being a sex worker?
WV: If you’re working-class, how do you come up with $300,000 to buy a house? The only guys I knew that made good money sold drugs. Those were the guys that could come up with $20,000 in cash on the spot. I started thinking about how Lynette would do it. Her body’s all she has to give to get money. But it’s a heavy cost because she’s not cut out for it. Gloria’s more of a professional. With Lynette, it’s desperation again. There’s no way working-class people can come up with $50,000 for a down payment. I was hesitant to go there, but I just thought, if it was me and I was her, it’d be selling drugs or doing sex work.
WB: Where did the novel’s title come from?
WV: I was just thinking about how the end always comes. This sounds too dramatic, but I was thinking about the end of America. Maybe it’s just the polarization of media and the breaking down of mainstream media and more folks getting information the way they want it about what they want. And also just the end of a city that’s affordable for people like Lynette. There’s always an end. The night always comes. Maybe Lynette and her family will navigate it and be OK. Or maybe it’ll be the end of them and Portland isn’t a place for them anymore.
WB: I love the title, and it definitely feels suited to the novel. It feels like it has this double action—it could be pessimistic or optimistic in some way.
WV: I do think Lynette is an optimist. I think she sees that you have to care and you have to try or you get lost—you get stuck in the basement like she was when she’d come home hopeless. There’s not a lot you can do. If you give up, you end up like the mom. And the mom knows she’s been beaten. Lynette knows that you have to try to be decent because if you don’t you just end up going out of your mind. I like her for that. Maybe I’m like Willeford and Goodis. I’m a damaged guy writing about damaged people. But someone like Lynette can get me out of bed. She’s beat-up and broken but she doesn’t give up. She’s tough. She was a pleasure to be around for a couple of years.
William Boyle is the author of the novels Gravesend, The Lonely Witness, A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself, City of Margins, and Shoot the Moonlight Out (forthcoming November 2021), all available from Pegasus Crime. His novella Everything Is Broken was published in Southwest Review (Volume 104, number 1-4). He also writes a monthly film column for Southwest Review called “I Wake Up Streaming.”
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