By Tim Jackson

The Horse probes the psyche of a man who believes, despite all that has happened to him, in the possibility of renewal.

The Horse by Willy Vlautin.  Harper Collins, 208 pages, $25.99.

Writer Willy Vlautin is a poet and writer who explores the unacknowledged struggles of the working class. In his previous novel, The Night Always Comes, a woman saddled with bad credit and juggling multiple jobs, some illegally, battled to purchase her own childhood home. It was her valiant attempt to claim a small piece of the American dream.

The Horse probes a world the author knows well: it is about an older musician on the skids. Vlautin is a guitarist and songwriter for an Oregon country soul band called “The Delines.” (In 2023, the group released a soundtrack album to Vlautin’s novel The Night Always Comes.) It is one of a number of regional groups who have a decent following, but have never entered the national spotlight. That said, the novel is not autobiographical, though Vlautin draws, vividly, on his familiarity with the traps and snares of the music world. Fictitious, but convincingly authentic, song titles and lyrics are woven throughout the narrative. The book’s protagonist is Al Ward, a musician who is reflecting on his accomplishments as he bemoans his self-destructive past. Now past his prime, Ward is an artist of genuine talent who finds himself bedeviled by a troubled history of loves lost and opportunities missed.

Ward’s rollercoaster life began with a misguided childhood. At fourteen, he stood at six’ 3″ and was rail thin. He remembers being swept away by the sound of country music while watching singer-songwriter Buck Owens on TV with Uncle Vern. A second Uncle, Mel, a hopeless alcoholic, teaches Ward how to shoot, hunt, and fish. When his mother’s boyfriend, Herb, recognizes that the boy’s “got the bug,” he gives him a guitar. Soon Ward is performing in a four-piece band and penning his first rockabilly tune, “Roll Reno Roll”. Some of its lyrics are prescient: I got no money/I got no home/The highway, man, is flashing by.

At 21, Ward marries a woman of 40 and his itinerant life begins. Chapters alternate between his past and present, where he is living an isolated existence, alone in the hills of Nevada. We are well into the story before Ward recalls asking his mother, shortly before she died, “Why have you always been so . . . cold to me? And who is my father? Don’t you owe me that?” His mother offered no response.

Alcohol, drugs, and sex numb the pain of memory and traumatic loss. Ward turns to music for salvation. Opportunities for a successful career come and go but, all too often, he is his own worst enemy. A second marriage to Maxine, a woman with a history of abuse, ends tragically. Once, as he descends into despair, he recalls the twenty-three songs he wrote for her. All the titles are listed.

When the book begins, Ward is 67 and holed up in a freezing, one-room shack. After he begins to look back at his early life, The horse appears — it is a fantastical image, a metaphor for the musician himself. The beast is blind, whipped by the winds and snow, and coyotes are nipping at its heels. The animal survives the odds, but it is bedraggled — beaten down by the elements and starvation. Ward wonders whether he should just shoot the nag — or perhaps the beast isn’t even real? “The gun was on the bed and night wore on and Al worried . . . He could shoot the horse, but there was a good chance he would make a bad shot.” Is it courage  — or fear — that keeps him from ending the horse’s life and his own? The surreal image stands in provocative contrast to the book’s vivid detailing of the land, nightclubs, diners, and the highs and lows of road life. This poetic blend of the actual and the fantastical vividly conveys Ward’s fevered state of mind.

Vlautin’s vision of Ward’s plight is not entirely pessimistic. His prose offers a rich description of the underbelly of the West, of the clubs, the bands, and the inevitable temptations of a musician’s life, from women to drugs, as the years grind on. A career dedicated to making music — without attaining fame or fortune — offers fleeting rewards. It takes grit to keep on going. Still, as time grinds on, the dread that success will never come grows.  I have seen many musicians fight to keep the dream alive, continuing to believe, often with a grudging stubbornness, that their art will be recognized one day. But, until that happens, some embrace self-abuse. Samuel Beckett’s ‘inspiring’ words in The Unnamable come to mind: “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on”. The Horse probes the psyche of a man who believes, despite all that has happened to him, in the possibility of renewal. There is always the promise of the next creation that keeps artists fighting: write another song, paint another painting, write another damn poem.

Tim Jackson was an assistant professor of Digital Film and Video for 20 years. His music career in Boston began in the 1970s and includes some 20 groups, recordings, national and international tours, and contributions to film soundtracks. He studied theater and English as an undergraduate, and has also worked helter-skelter as an actor and member of SAG and AFTRA since the 1980s. He has directed three feature documentaries: Chaos and Order: Making American Theater about the American Repertory Theater; Radical Jesters, which profiles the practices of 11 interventionist artists and agit-prop performance groups; When Things Go Wrong: The Robin Lane Story. And two short films: Joan Walsh Anglund: Life in Story and Poem and The American Gurner. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics. You can read more of his work on his blog.