She Treads Softly: Northline

Thursday, November 6, 2025

Northline

Northline by Willy Vlautin
9/27/11; 224 pages
HarperCollins

Northline by Willy Vlautin is an excellent, very highly recommended, brutally honest, yet ultimately moving domestic drama about overcoming. This one is hard to read emotionally, but stay with it. I simply loved this novel.

Allison Johnson is perpetually drunk and still with her abusive boyfriend Jimmy Bodie when she decides to flee Los Vegas and go to Reno. There she will give up for adoption the baby Jimmy knows nothing about and start a new life. Her imaginary conversations with Paul Newman help to ground her while she works the graveyard shift as a waitress at the Cal Neva Top Deck restaurant. She struggles but slowly takes steps to improve herself, including talking to regular customers like Dan Mahony and taking a second job as a telephone solicitor for Curt vacuum cleaners.

What Vlautin does so exceptionally well is capturing the emotions and turmoil in his characters while keeping it real. These are all very realistic working class characters who struggle everyday to just live their lives even while doubting themselves. Along the way there are people who step up to help Allison, showing that there are good people in the world who will help others rather than tear them down or take advantage of them. Ultimately, Allison, a memorable, fragile character, must overcome her bad decisions, even while her choices are limited, if she wants to live a normal life.

No comments:

Post a Comment

John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.