There is something quietly glorious about a novelist who identifies a furrow for their writing and then ploughs it diligently and skilfully from one novel to the next, with little concern for reinvention. For Willy Vlautin, that furrow is working-class life in the American west, burdened by debt, alcoholism and depression but enlivened, often, by music, friendship and connection to nature. Many of the elements that colour his earlier novels – motels, casinos, runaways and drifters – recur prominently in this latest, not least the horse of the title, which could be a relative of the long-suffering nag from 2010’s Lean on Pete.
First, though, we meet Al Ward, a 65-year-old musician, “bone-thin, with grey hair and blue eyes”, who is hiding out at a disused mine in the high desert of central Nevada with only his songs and memories for company. Ward is the future self that many young musicians dread becoming: booze-wracked and jaded but still plagued by the compulsion to turn everything into lyrics. (Vlautin, a songwriter himself with the bands Richmond Fontaine and the Delines, knows something of this compulsion.) Ward’s career has been spent penning folk songs with titles such as The Only Way I Know Is Down and The Girl With Drowning Eyes, and as he shuffles about his isolated shack we catch glimpses of the life that inspired such sorrowful compositions.
