Insidious Lassitude

I’d assumed Willy Vlautin’s novel ‘Northline’ to be set in the past. Some time like the 60s – or maybe even earlier. The artefacts described are similar to those in Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’, or perhaps a bit like the cultural milieu that Michael J. Fox finds himself in when he goes Back to the Future the first time. This is an America of Cadillacs, diners, truckstops, casinos, condominiums, and Marlboros. These sort of things make up an oft-quoted lexicon of American pop-culture that connotes frontierism and the mythyical America of the American Dream.

Into this though, Vlautin deploys a curiously anachronistic set of signifiers. Half-way through the novel the internet suddenly appears and it is clear that this is a contemporary story. Once this is apparent then so too become the constant stream of things which were later additions to the same American lexicon of signifiers, but that are somehow camouflaged or divorced from their timeframe, and assimilated into the same cultural text. In the novel there are the 1980s cars, the video stores, the Compact Discs, People magazine. On her (80s) Walkman, the central character, Allison, plays cassettes of 50s country singers Patti Page and Brenda Lee. The ease that these apparent anachronisms are surreptitiously merged is telling. The fact that they may be missed by the reader – until the startling appearance of the internet – is indicative, perhaps, of the way that American culture works to constantly polish the gleam of the façade, while the actual constituents of the country are alien to that façade. The American Dream is the sustenance of a consistent mien, in spite of the estrangement or displacement of those providing the elbow grease. Under the bonnet of the Dolorean, is a spluttering engine of a quite unexpected sort.

The book could thus be read as a sort of paean to a lost America, and these anarchronisms – and the general sleight of hand with which Vlautin conflates eras – are possibly reflective of a loss of cultural identity. Allison’s boyfriend is called Jimmy Bodie – a name which conjures images of a young man who drives a Cadillac, wears a wifebeater, drinks bottled beer, and has dark hair slicked back with pomade. Sure enough, Bodie is a character painted in the broadest brush strokes to be all of those things. He’s also a neo-fascist; he calls Mexicans ‘spicks’, burns their houses, and is a member of the ‘World Church of the Creator’. His conversations about immigration and indigenous Americans reveal a man who is confused and angry about his own identity and that of his country. He abuses Allison and she drinks heavily, which only causes him to beat her more. Against this backdrop the diners and the truckstops are emblems of an America that is contested; an American dream that is dysfunctional or illusory to the young and the poor – arguably the very people such a myth is meant to seduce, and nourish with hope.   

Allison falls pregnant by Bodie and wants to leave her hometown of Las Vegas before he finds out. Thus beginning another novel-long motif of estrangement and identity, Allison decides to move away and have the baby adopted. When she leaves she doesn’t know where to go. She tells her taxi driver to take her to the bus station, and when he asks her where she’s going, she replies, ‘Nowhere, I don’t think’. She is destination-less. She wants to leave but has nowhere to go; nothing to believe in.

She arrives in Reno; a place which – like anywhere else she could’ve chosen – she has no relationship to. She has no history there; no family; no friends. Not only are the cultural constructs questioned or contested, but in Reno she is also dispossessed of the personal constructs that traditionally engender identity. If contemporary – or postmodern – western society can be characterised as being shorn of a meta-narrative, the signifiers and signposts along the road divested of significance, then Allison represents the attendant fragmented and fractured personal and societal identity. As she did in Vegas, she wanders the streets after work, drunk. These bouts of fuggy peripateticism could be seen as indicative too of a postmodern condition where destination is absented.

This is the age of the internet and mobile communications but, in another twist of the era-dials in the Dolorean, Vlautin ignores the invention of mobile phones and email; in ‘Northline’ Jimmy Bodie writes letters, and Allison chooses whether to have a telephone connected in her new flat – physical location is entwined with emotional distance and availability. One of the key anachronisms of the novel is the way the interrogation of the way geographical space can invoke emotional distance. This is perhaps another facet of the mythical America that is proven untrue; the wide open spaces of America – and the roads through them – are divested of hope for Allison. They are only places of dislocation and identity-desolation, and this not an escape, or even a salve to her bruised sense of self. When she leaves for Reno she has no direction to go; no direction is better than any other. When she gets to Reno, she finds that she has the same struggles for personal identity as she had in Vegas. She still wrestles with the ghost of Jimmy Bodie, and her actions are still perpetuated by him. Living on the margins of Vegas or Reno is proven to be much the same; in each she is on the hinterland of society, on the verge of a featureless desert. 

Ultimately, although some of Reno’s most iconic buildings and casinos are torn down, Allison finds that she is unable to escape her past. In the same way that the site of the demolished buildings is to be built upon again, Allison begins a relationship with a new man because of the damage to her self that Bodie has caused. The icons change, but they are constructed on the same foundations. Relationships, buildings, identity, the past, the present, here, there: they all merge.