The Horse

February 1, 2024

Al Ward lives on an isolated mining claim in Nevada while insomnia and anxiety consume him. When a horse appears, Al considers whether it is real, and thinks back over his life as a musician as he considers how he ended up in this state. Vlautin's The Night Always Comes was an Indie Next and a LibraryReads pick. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from May 15, 2024
Sixtysomething songwriter Al Ward lives alone on an abandoned mine claim in the Nevada mountains without electricity or running water. He is mostly off the drink now, subsists solely on Campbell's condensed soup, and spends his waking moments, which frequently come in the middle of the night, working on songs until one morning when he discovers an injured, blind horse standing outside his shack. No stranger to symbolism, Al sees this as a sign, a mirror into his own battered psyche. Acclaimed novelist and songwriter Vlautin (The Night Always Comes, 2021) brilliantly blends his two vocations into a powerful, moving character study of a man imbued with a deep sadness. Al is a prolific songwriter whose songs speak to the broken and brokenhearted, and Vlautin shares dozens of song titles from Al's voluminous oeuvre, cleverly adding soulful depth to the narrative. Al strums the six-string while tugging at the heartstrings. The story shifts from Al's present circumstances to episodes throughout his life, including the acquisition of his first guitar, his many gigs with country acts on the casino circuit, and later success in a country punk band with two Mexican brothers. The novel itself feels like a classic song, a lament of a lonesome balladeer, resulting in a singular masterpiece. Vlautin has composed another classic.

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May 27, 2024
Songwriter and novelist Vlautin’s heartrending latest (after The Night Always Comes) centers on Al Ward, an aging country music guitarist and songwriter whose 40 years on the road have left him broken and struggling with alcoholism. He lives without electricity or running water on his late great-uncle’s mining claim in central Nevada, subsisting on canned soup and spending his days writing songs and going for walks. When a blind horse shows up at his doorstep in the depths of winter, he must decide: will he let the horse die, or will he try to save it by walking 30 miles to his closest neighbor for help? His deliberations are messy and convoluted, and he eventually chooses the latter course. While trudging through the snow, he’s flooded with memories of his severe mother and alcoholic uncle, his only father figure, and recalls how he escaped his unhappy childhood through music after seeing Buck Owens and his band in concert (“When they played, suddenly Al wasn’t Al anymore. He was transported inside the noise and rhythm and melody and story”). He also reflects on his ex-wife, Maxine, and ruminates on his regrets over losing her. As Al tries to redeem himself, Vlautin movingly conveys the power of music to reveal new possibilities in one’s life. This shines.

Starred review from June 15, 2024
Helping a sick horse gives a washed-up musician in his 60s a chance to make peace with his past. "Please," whispers Al Ward, "please give me the strength to pull the trigger and let it be over." Al isn't contemplating suicide. An old horse has wandered into the abandoned Nevada mining camp that Al calls home, and he wants to put it out of its misery. The camp belonged to his late great-uncle Mel, who mined it for years with no success. Al would stay there and dry out whenever the excesses of life as a journeyman guitarist and songwriter became too much. But now the horse, scarred and bleeding from a coyote bite, intrudes on the camp, where Al has been holed up and hiding from his demons. The horse doesn't do anything to provoke him. It just stands there in the snow, right outside the assayer's office where Al sleeps, eats, thinks, and still writes songs by lantern light. When Al decides to show mercy and points his old .357 at the animal, he tearfully realizes that he can't kill the poor beast "because he felt that he and the horse were the same." It's a familiar, oft-told story of someone unexpectedly finding healing in the presence of an animal, but Vlautin makes that trope his own. His writing style is spare, restrained, unsentimental, yet full of emotion and force. A songwriter and band frontman, Vlautin understands the ups and downs of a touring musician's life, and his experiences inform Al's long career playing casinos from Las Vegas to Reno to Tahoe and beyond. Al has a gift for songwriting, and plenty of tortured musicians--including heartbreaker Mona and the self-destructive Sanchez Brothers--clamored after him to write hits for them. Al never wished for much in life, only, as he says of the horse, to "be all right and live an all right life." He's managed to have plenty of all right moments, especially during his short-lived marriage to his true love, Maxine. Helping the horse might give him a chance to have another one. After Al makes a long trek to get help, a friend teases him that what he's done "says something. Most people wouldn't cross the street to do something decent, and you walked thirty miles in the snow, and you're a drunk, lazy musician." But Al's risky walk shows he's more than that; he's still full of surprises. Anyone who's hit rock bottom can still get a shot at redemption if they're willing to do what it takes.

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