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“The only way to get through school is to disappear into a song. Just hum it to yourself and you’ll be okay. If you hate being home, hate it here, just disappear into a song. It works, man, I’m telling you it really works.”
So reads the epigraph—credited to a “fifteen-year-old friend of my brother’s talking to me…when I was eleven”—to Willy Vlautin’s new novel, The Horse (HarperCollins, 208 pages, $25.99), his seventh book and the first with music as a principal subject. The Horse opens with a kind of disappearance in progress, albeit one undertaken without the youthful fervor of the epigraph.
On an old mining claim in central Nevada, 50 miles from Tonopah, 67-year-old Al Ward has, for about five years, passed one day much as another: sleep, drink from liquor bottles; eat Campbell’s soup; write songs in spiral notebooks; walk a mile to a dilapidated miner’s shack; drink more; and then return to fitful, troubled sleep. On the second morning readers spend with Al, he wakes to find a horse in the middle of the road. The horse’s eyes are crusted shut, and it appears to be blind. Al attempts to ignore the horse and maintain his self-destructive routine, but the horse stubbornly remains. Al’s disquieting memories of the past and growing concern for the horse in the present come to a simultaneous climax, and he makes a lengthy trek to try to save the horse—and himself.
The Horse’s sensitivity to animal consciousness and well-being, especially of one battered about by life, recalls Vlautin’s other animal characters, such as the eponymous equine character from Lean on Pete and the dog in The Motel Life. There is, though, more mystery here than in those works. How the horse got there, where it came from, how it survives days without food or water—these questions are never answered.
There is also the implausibility of Al, a sedentary alcoholic in his late 60s, walking 30 miles in the snow in two days without adequate shelter and on only half a can of soup. Such details are inexplicable under the conventions of the realist novel, suggesting The Horse partakes partly of that mode and the spiritual biography. The horse’s miraculous appearance precipitates Al’s crisis, physical trial and, ultimately, his own miraculous redemption.
Most of the book, though, transpires not in the present but in Al’s recollections. These follow Al from age 14, when he receives the gift of a 1959 butterscotch-blond Telecaster guitar and Fender Princeton amp, to his first bands and heartbreaks, and on through his career. Vlautin’s great gift for detail, for evocation of a time and place, and his empathy are evident throughout. As with a story in a country song, even though you know at the outset how things will generally go, the delight is in the delivery and the details, and Vlautin does not disappoint.
There are, though, a few inconsistencies in the timeline, with Al’s birth year shifting between 1945 and 1947. These shortcomings aside, Vlautin’s sense of place and detail is on display throughout and maybe most evident when deftly capturing the life of a working-class musician: the grueling gig schedule, the late hours and long nights, the way bands come and go, the driving, the touring, the band infighting, and the impulse that drives someone to persist in spite of all the hardships. Alcohol is one of the profession’s principal hazards, and Vlautin does a fine job of depicting the ravages of alcoholism in the musical life.
The life of a musician is not all disappointments and hangovers; there is also the joy of creative pursuit. The Horse shows Al continually working out new songs, a few of which appear in full, while many others appear as titles that pay homage to and gently send up country music tropes. To list a few: “I Hit It Big but It Hit Back Bigger (Now I’m Hitchhiking Home),” “High Time We Quit This Low Living,” and “The Ballad of Frank and Jerry Lee” (a subtle reference to the principal characters in The Motel Life, Vlautin’s first novel).
The gear references will carry more meaning for musicians, especially when bad things happen to instruments and amps, but any attentive reader will note how Al, no matter how low he has sunk, remains devoted to the craft of music. There is clearly great respect and affection for music in the novel, which is dedicated to John Doe, whose band X and classic album Los Angeles receive a prominent nod in the text, and to Sadies founding member and guitarist Dallas Good, who died in 2022.
Al survives the long walk and the torment of his memories, making it to the nearby ranch to ask for help. There’s hope for Al in the novel, both in his devotion to music and his relationship with ranch hand Lonnie:
“’I bet you’ll probably write a song about that horse. Am I right?’
“Al sat up in his seat. ‘It’s interesting you said that, Lonnie, because while I was walking to find you, I thought of a couple ideas that could work. I’m just not sure which angle yet…I’ll probably have to write a few to get the right one.’”