Willy Vlautin: ‘I can’t quit alcohol because of my nerves. I’ve never been strong enough to not have that in my back pocket’

“I’ve always been attracted to damaged, ragged things,” says Willy Vlautin. “They make me feel comfortable. Even walking around here, when I see someone a little shattered, it’s a weird thing, but it’s just: Thank God, there’s somebody else that feels rough.”

Vlautin is cheerful, sincere and easy company, with a direct gaze and a melodious voice. He is a highly acclaimed author and musician whose writing has been praised by contemporaries including Donna Tartt, Roddy Doyle and Colm Tóibín, and his albums and gigs, with alt-country outfit Richmond Fontaine and more recently The Delines, have won him fans across Europe, Australia and the United States.

But an outer carapace – no matter how sturdy – can hide all manner of fragilities. Through his seven novels, Vlautin, who is 56, has made it his hallmark to write about characters who lead hard lives, lives that have often resembled his own. In his debut novel, The Motel Life (2006), Vlautin chronicled the existence of two struggling, working-class brothers. In his second, Northline (2008), he wrote about anxiety. In his third, Lean on Pete (2010), he detailed, with sympathy and insight, a friendship between a neglected young boy and a racehorse. All of it mined territory close to his heart.

My mom’s definition of alcoholism would be: a real man gets up and goes to work on a hangover and an alcoholic doesn’t. So, as long as you can go to work, you’re not an alcoholic

Now he has returned with another study of a horse, a horse half-blind and near death when his 65-year-old character Al, “bone-thin, with grey hair and blue eyes” and nearly half-dead himself, encounters it. Al, a musician and songwriter, has an ongoing battle with the bottle and his nerves. He’s living in total solitude near a disused mine in the high desert of central Nevada, surviving on tins of Campbell’s soup, with a car that doesn’t run and a pistol positioned in an olive-green metal chest nearby.

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The Horse is a novel full of plain truths, hard-earned realisations and sentences that cut close to the bone. Perhaps too close, even for Vlautin. He didn’t initially intend to publish the novel – and now, over a cup of tea in a city-centre hotel in Dublin, there are hesitations and circumnavigations when he talks about it. He smiles, his eyes crinkling at the edges, looking rueful. “I have a trunk full of faults. One is that when I write a book, I never think about anybody else reading it. With this book, I forgot how similar he and I were.”

[ The Horse by Willy Vlautin: tuned to the broken-down key of life ]

As it dips into the past, the book charts Al’s descent. “Alcoholism: this was my book trying to figure out my own battle with it,” Vlautin says. “I’m not as bad as old Al. But I’m close. I equate drinking to playing with a poisonous snake. It’s not if it’s gonna bite you, but when and how bad.

“My mom was a good drinker. Her definition of alcoholism would be: a real man gets up and goes to work on a hangover and an alcoholic doesn’t. So, as long as you can go to work, you’re not an alcoholic. My brother and I spent years crawling to work, but we never missed work.”

Vlautin was born and raised in Reno, Nevada. He grew up shy and cripplingly self-conscious. Life at home wasn’t easy: his single mother struggled with her nerves and never took a holiday from her secretary job; his father lived a few miles away, but Vlautin rarely saw him. The Nevada landscape was beautiful – the desert, the hawks soaring on updrafts through the mountain ranges – but it was dotted with casinos (“I hate casinos: casinos are the devil”), early bars and temptations.

In the novel, Al drinks to beat his anxiety. Vlautin has done the same. Has he quit alcohol? “I can’t quit,” he says candidly. “Because of my nerves. I’ve never been strong enough to not have that in my back pocket when I needed it.”

As a young man, Vlautin found a route to salvation through his dedication to music and the arts. “I wanted to live inside the safety of songs,” he says. “I loved that idea so much. You can’t eat your records, but you can join up. Plant a flag. I didn’t want to be the drunk guy that ruins the gig. I’m a workhorse. I’ve never wanted booze to get the upper hand. I have to do the work on myself so the art is on top. I’d be too ashamed of myself if I let booze get in the way.

Al never ‘makes it’, the way we think bands and artists are supposed to. But he finds peace in crafting a song

“In the book, Al gravitates towards damaged people,” he says. “Because damaged people meet damaged people – that’s pretty basic. If you’re beat-up, you’re attracted to somebody beat-up. Unless you can train yourself. It took years for me to train myself not to be like that.”

For years, whether making music or writing books, Vlautin was afraid to do anything other than low-paid, menial jobs to get by because he didn’t want to get too comfortable, and trade in his willingness to make art for the comfort of a nicer settee or a bigger apartment. “It was half out of confidence problems, half out of not making money, because I knew if I made money I would get a nicer place to live. And then I wouldn’t be able to quit everything.”

To some, Vlautin notes, The Horse is the story of not being in a successful band – Al never “makes it”, the way we think bands and artists are supposed to. But he finds peace in crafting a song. He finds escape in creating lyrics. He finds solace in his battered Telecaster. Craig Finn of The Hold Steady, a friend of Vlautin, read the book and saw that side of it. “He goes, ‘Man, that guy had a good life! He had a couple of women love him, he was in a good band.’ He was the first guy that felt the way I felt about him.”

Finn understood the idea of the work being its own reward. “When you write a song that you think is good, it just feels really good,” says Vlautin.

Or, as Al puts it in The Horse, it’s like “holding hope in your pocket”.

The Horse by Willy Vlautin is out now, published by Faber