The Horse: A Novel

“the down-and-out world of Raymond Carver and Andre Dubus III, with song lyrics added.”

Maybe Al Ward coulda been a contender in the world of country music. He spent the better part of five decades, ever since he was a teenager, writing songs and playing the casino circuit from Texas to Nevada with a string of little-known bands. His songs were good, people said, really good.

But the bands usually fell apart. So did Al’s marriages. And always, there was plenty of booze right at hand.

As The Horse opens, Al is 67 years old and living in a shack without electricity or running water, on an abandoned mining claim in the mountains of central Nevada. One frigid winter morning, he wakes up to find a blind horse standing outside the shack, “its left eye completely swollen shut, the socket encrusted with dried blood and dirt and bits of sagebrush . . . its mane matted and tangled with sagebrush, its body littered with scars.”

The horse refuses to eat the mashed spaghetti that Al cooks. Coyotes circle. Al tries to seek help in the closest town, 30 miles away, but his car battery died long ago and there’s no other way to reach the town except on foot. He even tries to shoot the horse, just to put the animal out of its misery; however, he can’t make himself pull the trigger.

Clearly, this is the down-and-out world of Raymond Carver and Andre Dubus III, with song lyrics added. Author Willy Vlautin himself is a musician as well as the author of six novels, two of which have been produced as films.

Al’s history unspools in a tangle, as each encounter with the horse evokes another memory,

usually of failure but sometimes of brief hope. His song titles are also a wonderful shorthand for the course of his life: “Tapped Out in Tulsa.” “Walking by the House Where I Used to Live.” “Henrietta, I’ll Love You Forever.” “Watch Out Perlita—He’s Got a Knife.”

He is drawn to music because, from the first time he listened to country music on his mother’s radio, “suddenly Al wasn’t Al anymore. He was transported inside the noise and rhythm and melody and story.”

The writing is powerful in its simplicity and spareness. Vlautin is masterful in using the drumbeat of repetition, in scene after scene, to emphasize the monotony of Al’s existence in the shack: “He lit the lantern and took off his boots and his thermal coveralls and put on sweats. He added wood to the stove, made instant coffee, and sat in the recliner.” And again. And again.

However, in the overall narrative, the repeated patterns eventually become annoying and even confusing—one band after another, one girlfriend or wife after another—until it’s hard to remember which band fired Al after he vomited all over the cartons of CDs and T-shirt merch, and which band crumbled because the lead singer was arrested for assault.

Some readers will undoubtedly find the book too depressing. The ending, meanwhile, feels too abrupt.

Despite everything, Al desperately seeks humanity, even if it’s from a horse. “He thought of the birth of the horse. . . . The hope that it would be all right and live on all right life. That it would amount to something and live without too much pain. The hope that, at least for a time, it would have an easy run.”

For too few times, Al had those hopeful runs.