An unreachable dream

Set in Nevada, it vividly portrays the underclass of people for whom the American dream is an impossibility, the sort of people for whom the forthcoming election is an irrelevance.

Allison Johnson is a high school dropout who drinks until she passes out and has a series of dead-end jobs. Her boyfriend hangs out with right-wing skinheads and she lives at home with her deadbeat mother.

As a perverse form of therapy, she sends herself notes saying what a bad person she is. With almost no self-esteem, it is little wonder that she also self-harms.

Finding herself pregnant and unable to cope, she heads for Reno, where she puts her child up for adoption.

Slowly, with the help of the lost souls that she meets working the graveyard shift at a local restaurant, she gradually tries to rebuild her life.

Vlautin is mature and honest enough not to give us a sweetened happy ending, although there is a ray of hope at the closure of the book.

Vlautin's writing style pares everything down to an absolute minimum, so there is almost no fat or excess in any sentence, paragraph or chapter. It is an art that you wish many other authors could achieve.

That, coupled with his character-driven realism, means that he is an author worth discovering and this is a novel well worth reading.

RICHARD HILTON