2024 BOOK REVIEW #26: THE HORSE BY WILLY VLAUTIN

My book review #26 of 2024 and probably my final one, as part of a resolution this past year to write book reviews for each I read, to perhaps inspire others, is for The Horse by Willy Vlautin, a hand me down from others in my family.

I once had the immense privilege of interviewing Vlautin himself for an Our Town Reno story about motels he’d written about in his first book The Motel Life, now mostly all gone amid downtown gentrification: https://www.ourtownreno.com/our-stories-1/2018/4/15/willy-vlautin-author-of-the-motel-life-torn-on-renos-disappearing-motels

His latest book has stark, folksy, minimalistic echoes of the late great Cormac McCarthy, with a 60-something songwriter, guitarist barely living out memories of gone south relationships and being a small time but admired musician in multiple bands, who dishearteningly make more money when playing covers.

An ailing horse by an unused mine in a barren part of Nevada where he’s living his last chapter, thanks to his great uncle who repeatedly came to his rescue, serves as a metaphor for himself. The question is whether or not he will try yet again to save himself, this time by way of the horse.

The musician’s recollections bounce around from one strange band to another, all the songs he’s written, and the relationships he’s failed at, some for better, others for much worse. As in many of Vlautin’s other books, drifters, struggling poets, the down and almost entirely out, the kitschy casinos, the drab truck stop lounges, and the grimy motels take center stage.

Vlautin, a songwriter and musician himself, who grew up partly in and out of Reno motels, knows this West Coast milieu all too well.

One takeaway from this book is that kindness, talent and passion will occasionally save you, and give you grace upon others, but that an addiction such as alcoholism will ultimately bury you.

Reno serves as a base which he can never get away from, even if it fuels his alcoholism rather than his potential. The book is a rich song, meandering through a torn up life with too many regrets, but plenty of fodder for more to write.