The journey of a blind horse and a dejected musician

Willy Vlautin has a weakness for horses.

In his six previous novels, horses appear again and again in anecdotes, as transportation and even as characters. Vlautin’s third novel, “Lean on Pete,” is about a boy who works at a rundown racetrack in Oregon and befriends a racehorse destined for the glue factory.

Horses also appear regularly in Vlautin’s songs. He has released several albums, EPs and singles as a solo artist and with his bands Richmond Fontaine and, most recently, The Delines. In 2016, Richmond Fontaine released the album “You Can’t Go Back If There’s Nothing to Go Back To,” which included the song “The Blind Horse.” It’s an instrumental song, as if Vlautin had no words to describe what it must feel like to be so agonizingly lost in the wilderness of the American West.

With the publication of his latest novel, “The Horse,” Vlautin announces that he has much to say about this predicament and that it could be his masterpiece.

The novel opens in the early 21st century with a blind horse stumbling upon an old abandoned mining camp in central Nevada where Al Ward has taken up residence to die. Al is a musician and alcoholic who is so disgusted with himself and the mess he has made of his life that he has retreated to a remote redoubt where he can cause no harm to anyone but himself.

Al spends his days in a one-room shack, lighting his wood stove, brewing coffee, and heating up cans of Campbell's soup, barely making enough to survive. As he gathers firewood and goes for walks, his mind wanders and his thoughts turn to the bands he used to play in, the women he loved and lost, and the songs he wrote along the way.

Al still has a guitar and a spiral notebook in which he composes sad, soulful ballads. These songs are more than a record of the places he went and the people he met; they are an affirmation of the only thing that gave his life meaning. When he recalls the moments when he played with his bandmates, in those moments “suddenly Al was no longer Al,” Vlautin writes. “He was transported inside the noise, the rhythm, the melody and the story. It was as if he suddenly understood that just by listening to a song he could disappear from himself.”

However, this disappearance came at a price. The relief Al sought in music only lasted as long as the show went on, and as the years passed, touring brought in less money and took him further and further from home. Worse, alcohol—the drink that helped him survive a life on the road—turned against him.

“He didn’t remember falling or scraping his hands or the sound of his guitar breaking. He only remembered waking up in his car outside the Banc Club covered in vomit, with his guitar in pieces and his notebook missing. During more than forty years of drinking, he had rarely passed out, but now he did so frequently.”

Unable to drink like he used to, Al retreats to the deserted mining camp, where his memories take on a spectral presence.

Then the horse appears, bringing Al back to life and into action, but he's been lost in himself for so long that he's not even sure if the horse is real.

Unlike many of the cowboys and ranch hands Al sang about and Vlautin writes about in his books, Al is not prepared to help the animal.

“Al didn’t know anything about horses. He had never ridden one and couldn’t remember ever touching one. He had never been to a camp or ranch as a kid. He couldn’t remember ever seeing one up close.”

More comfortable in a Reno casino than in a shack 50 miles from the nearest town, Al realizes that if he wants to save this horse, he has to do something he's never been able to do on his own: ask for help.

Vlautin writes about the “sickness and regret, sadness and self-hatred” endemic to addiction in a way that is both heartbreaking and tender. This is familiar territory for Vlautin, who was born and raised in Reno, and has spent most of his life writing and singing about people living on the fringes of society, but “The Horse” marks the first time he’s written from the perspective of a musician.

The book is dedicated to Los Angeles singer-songwriter John Doe, famous for the punk band X. Al's memories of playing in a punk band with the Sanchez Brothers, who are famous for feuding with each other, paint a portrait of what can happen to those born to go too hard, too fast.

Throughout the book, Al recalls the titles of songs he wrote for bands he played in and women he loved, and these catalogs of song titles serve as a secret text that runs throughout the novel. The songs he wrote for the Sanchez Brothers, “Uno, Dos, Tres — I’m Gonna Bust Your Face,” are especially upbeat, but the number of songs that reference his ex-wife Maxine speak to the depth of his despair in a way that lyrics never could.

Vlautin’s talent for capturing the unique terror of the moment when heavy drinking turns to impotence is rendered with heartbreaking acuity. With the majestic desolation of the high desert as a backdrop, Vlautin’s depiction of one broken soul trying to save another is aspirational, allegorical, and ultimately transcendent. If a heavy-hearted road dog like Al can rise above his malaise to help a wayward old horse, maybe there’s hope for him (and the rest of us) after all.

Jim Ruland is the author of the novel “Make It Stop” and the narrative history “Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records.”