Enigmatic, beautiful ... Vlautin’s intriguing structure elevates his game ... Mythical yet inventive, a struggle between man and beast, The Horse follows the playbook of The Old Man and the Sea or Julia Phillips’s recent Bear, weighing the totemic natural world against the frailties of the human condition.
Vlautin’s gift for capturing the unique terror of the moment when heavy drinking turns to helplessness is rendered with heartbreaking acuity. Set against the desolate majesty of the high desert, Vlautin’s depiction of one broken soul trying to save another is aspirational, allegorical and, ultimately, transcendent.
It sounds bleak, and it is, but The Horse, weighing in at little more than 200 pages, is also lithe and, for all its jumping around in time, tremendously compelling. Vlautin’s characters are briskly sketched, with the risk that all the ex-bandmates and former lovers begin to blur together, but the dialogue is sturdy and the milieu in which Ward’s career unfolds... is richly conjured.
Vlautin’s most satisfying book to date ... Vlautin intersects tender, torn and frayed episodes of wrecks, drugs and rock’n’roll into Al’s redemptive quest. The writing on music is superb; the underbelly of the working-band life, of the wannabes and never-gonna-bes rings so true here, you know Vlautin has lived part of it, seen a lot of it.
It’s a familiar, oft-told story of someone unexpectedly finding healing in the presence of an animal, but Vlautin makes that trope his own. His writing style is spare, restrained, unsentimental, yet full of emotion and force.
