'Northline' is second Vlautin novel

"Northline" (Harper Perennial) is the second novel by Willy Vlautin, former Renoite and leader of the band Richmond Fontaine, and it's a fine follow-up to his first book, "The Motel Life."

Allison Johnson is a high school dropout, working as a waitress in Vegas. She's pregnant, involved in an abusive relationship with a budding skin-head, and even though plagued by a continuing series of bad decisions, a crippling lack of self-confidence, she somehow senses she's gotta get out.

Vlautin says that Allison just sorta fell into him one night and he began writing her story.

So she heads north - looking for something better - setting off for Reno, not for any reason in particular, other than it might be nice to be where there's the possibility of snow on the ground and she could wear a coat and hat in the winter.

She gives up the child for adoption, gets a job at the Cal-Neva's Top Deck Coffee Shop and sets about trying to get it right. The past continues to haunt her, her deeply ingrained tendency to repeat old mistakes comes floating back, she starts spinning, losing control, trying to drink away the phantoms, the low opinion of herself, her bad nerves and anxiety attacks.

As in his first book, Vlautin delivers the tale in straight-forward, gritty prose which is leavened here with surrealistic interludes, imagined, perhaps, conversations with Paul Newman - as characters from most of his movies - who acts as a kind of patron saint encouraging her to keep going.

Although Allison doesn't know where she's going, she just won't quit, she keeps at it. Gradually, she begins to pull it together, forming friendships with other damaged souls-a janitor at the V.A. Hospital, an overweight tele-marketing vacuum cleaner sales rep.

The finely wrought characters are sad and sweet at the same time, and collectively they create a mood-laden sense of possibility, played out as the emblems of the past - Harold's Club, the Nevada Club - are imploded. And, even though chain stores may be the only roots that people will have anymore, who knows what might come from the rubble of the past.

Nothing is sentimentalized here, Valutin's spare prose is unflinchingly real. His writing evokes Hemingway, Ray Carver and Denis Johnson's early works in its style; John Fante and Charles Bukowski in its portrayals of on-the-edge and over, scraping to get by, displaced souls. But his real gift to us is the creation of characters that you actually care about, something all too rare in contemporary fiction.

The book comes with a "soundtrack" CD of instrumental music by Vlautin and pedal-steel player, Paul Brainard, that accurately reflects the feelings of his precisely rendered characters.