The rural West suffers from a persistently high suicide rate, with Montana leading the nation for the past three years, according to the The New York Times. Public health experts point to a host of possible reasons behind this grim statistic, including the region’s ready access to firearms, the lack of rural economic opportunity and the entrenched fear of community stigma about seeking mental health care. The suicide rate is highest among elderly white men, and, according to PBS NewsHour, farmers and ranchers are 3.5 times more likely to die by suicide than the rest of the population.
Two accomplished new novels by acclaimed Oregon-based authors feature elderly male protagonists at just such a crossroads. In writer Joe Wilkins’ gorgeous, emotionally astute The Entire Sky, 71-year-old Montana sheep rancher Rene Bouchard has just lost his wife to cancer and is suffering from hampered mobility that makes the work he loves increasingly hard to do. So when he heads out to his remote ranch, he’s determined to lamb his herd one more time and then end his life with a .243. In Willy Vlautin’s lively and moving The Horse, 67-year-old Al Ward struggles with alcoholism exacerbated by his career as an itinerant guitarist. As the novel starts, he is trying to dry out at an inherited mining claim near Tonopah, Nevada, but remains he beset by the 3 a.m. “suicide hour,” which he calls “the night prison.” Fortunately, neither of these singular protagonists is left alone to sink completely into despair. In both novels, guitars and their music serve as a motif, underscoring the positive forces that can pull desperate people away from darkness: acceptance of difference, creative expression and a sense of community.
As The Horse opens, Al Ward has become increasingly isolated, battling crippling depression and anxiety that make it “a brawl each morning just to get his feet on the ground.” He’s living off canned soup and relying on his friend Lonnie, who lives 30 miles away. Al walks outside one morning to discover a blind horse, “its mane matted and tangled with sagebrush, its body littered with scars.” He wants to help, but he “knew nothing of horses.” He also discovers his car won’t start because he didn’t run it periodically, as Lonnie advised.
The Horse
By Willy Vlautin
208 pages, hardcover: $26.99
Harper, 2024
As Al cycles through every option to assist the horse before coyotes attack it, eventually setting out on an improbable quest, he reminisces about his remarkable life as a songwriter and guitarist, mostly for Reno-area casino bands. It’s clear that the condition of the battered horse mirrors his own emotional and physical decrepitude. Vlautin writes frank, clear prose that matches the weather-beaten outlook and circumscribed prospects of his characters. Al keeps a note attached to his loaded pistol, urging him not to use it on himself. Even though he can barely manage the daily tasks of living, the presence of the horse stirs in him a fierce desire to save it. “He thought of the birth of the horse,” Vlautin writes, “the hope in that. The hope that it would be all right and live an all right life. That it would amount to something and live without too much pain. The hope that, at least for a time, it would have an easy run. That it would never end up blind in the middle of nowhere with no friends and no outcome other than death.”
Although The Horse is structured through reminiscence, it remains taut, defying the way flashback-heavy novels can sometimes dissipate tension, because Al’s anecdotes are so precise and so germane — distinctively peopled and full of colorful incident. Vlautin is a master of sliding into a flashback in a way that feels genuine. He intrigues the reader with a detail and then dives into the past with a knife-clean entry.
One of the pleasures of The Horse are the names of the songs Al composes, which are often inspired by his misadventures. Song titles include “I Hit It Big But It Hit Back Bigger (Now I’m Hitchhiking Home),” “They’re Fighting Again Next Door” and “Cassie’s on the Con Again.” Vlautin, a musician himself and founding member of Richmond Fontaine and the Delines, writes with authenticity and wry humor about the life of a side musician.
Al keeps a note attached to his loaded pistol, urging him not to use it on himself.
The Entire Sky is structured in an expansive, deft, three-perspective braid, bringing the viewpoints of Rene, the widowed rancher, his daughter Lianne, and a runaway 16-year-old named Justin into chorus. The story opens in April 1994, just as the world learns of the death of Kurt Cobain, the singer a skinny, blonde, sixteen-year-old named Justin resembles and idolizes. Months earlier, Justin was sent from the Seattle area by his addict mother to live with his raging uncle Heck, who isolates and abuses him. Justin finally frees himself through a courageous act that ensures the police will come after him. Carrying his beloved guitar, Justin hikes, hitchhikes and stows away until he ends up on Rene Bouchard’s ranch.
Rene has just fired a hired man after discovering his dereliction of ranch duties, and realizes he won’t be able to help his sheep through the lambing process by himself. He allows Justin to stay in the bunkhouse, no questions asked, recalling the way he used to take jobs as a young, unknown ranch hand. Rene and Justin forge an uneasy alliance that gradually warms as they assist the sheep delivering lambs, a process that enraptures Justin.
Meanwhile, Rene’s daughter Lianne has lingered in Montana after nursing her mother through her illness. Stifled in her marriage, she yearns to stay and also to pursue writing poetry again, a vocation she set aside as family and work demands pressed in. Eventually, Lianne discovers Justin on the ranch and realizes his presence is helping her dad work through unresolved pain from the early death of his youngest son, Franklin. Franklin was gay, unable to express this to his family and relentlessly harassed by the town’s bigots. Lianne reflects about her father, “He’d never worn his grief at all but hung it like a dark suit in the back of the closet. They’d lose a lamb, and he’d go quiet for an afternoon. The death of a good dog might mean a week of silence. And after Franklin’s funeral, Rene more or less shut himself away from everyone — the few friends he had in town, his children, even Viv — for years.” As Rene sets aside suicidal thinking and relishes another chance to bond with a young man through ranch work, Lianne resolves to find a way help Justin.
The Entire Sky
By Joe Wilkins
384 pages, hardcover: $29
Little, Brown and Company, 2024
Wilkins’ prose is lush and poetic, often expressing keen emotional insights through the characters’ reflections on the landscape. Rene thinks, “It seemed to him now he’d never known his own self, let alone his family. Or he had, for a time, but those known to him had deepened in intricacy and become fathomless, the way you might ride a certain ridgeline trail in all weather for years and still be surprised at what the April rains uncovered, what came blooming up from the dry and ancient earth.”
Both these novels engage with the dark sides of Western culture. For Al, it’s the hard-drinking and addiction that comes with playing in Nevada casinos and bars. For Rene, it’s the cowboy ethos that persecutes kids who deviate from standard gender expression or sexuality that bedeviled Franklin and Justin alike.
“He’d never worn his grief at all but hung it like a dark suit in the back of the closet.”
Although The Horse and The Entire Sky grapple with weighty subjects, neither book feels grim. Surviving won’t be easy, but, as Rene says, “What’s easy is seldom what’s right.” Both novels become more buoyant as they unfold, as Wilkins and Vlautin allow the joy of their characters’ lives to shine through even as they examine the depths of despair their protagonists have endured. These fine novels are leavened by natural beauty, the goodness and humor provided by children, animals and friends, and the genuine care and concern of family members and neighbors for men who think they’ve outlived any such ties. The persistent song of ongoing life warbles through to call these men, in tones that are low at first but gradually grow stronger as these novels rise to their satisfying and optimistic, yet never simplistic, conclusions.
Photo illustration credits: A flock of sheep and a donkey in a field in the Western U.S. Loren Chipman/CC via Flickr; An 1883 map of Montana’s mountains. Encyclopædia Britannica/Public domain; A cloud in the sky. J. Triepke/CC via Flickr; A Brno Model 21H rifle. Nechako River/CC via Flickr
A diagram of a horse hoof. Internet Archive Book Images/Wikimedia Commons; A person playing the guitar. Leah Makin/CC via Flickr; Hand holding a beer. Geoff LMV/CC via Flickr; A ranch in Montana near West Yellowstone. Charles (Scott) Barhill/CC via Flickr
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