MixedThe New York Times Book Review... determined ... This is a novel that lives firmly in the melancholia of the city’s gentrification, hurtling readers through one woman’s desperation to keep her life afloat in a city that’s pushing its working class out, one razed lot at a time ... The novel, Vlautin’s sixth, stalls out during its many long monologues spelling out exactly what each character is thinking in clunky detail. Vlautin’s etchings of the city’s poor, white population are at times overwrought, especially around the topic of weight, as are the inner lives of anyone who’s not the main character. That tendency is extra egregious when it comes to Lynette’s mother, a dreary antagonist whose motives no number of monologues manage to three-dimensionalize ... The novel regains its footing, though, in the moments where we get to live in Lynette’s inner world ... The central question of her night resonates beyond this one family: Can one person be built to sink, or is she set up to fail by an entire system designed to keep the poor not just working, but hurting? Anyone who’s scrambled within the confines of poverty may relate to Lynette’s quest for agency over her own fate. With The Night Always Comes, Vlautin chronicles the downfall of a city. As Lynette’s story illustrates, it’s an undoing that is deeply personal, too.
