C&C 60: The Horse and Lake George

Willy Vlautin’s latest novel and a throwback crime movie

Recently I read that Willy Vlautin’s The Night Always Comes (2021) is being adapted into a movie at Netflix. (As is often the case, the film’s title will apparently lose its definitive article for no good reason.) This is excellent news, because Night is a terrific Pacific Northwest novel, one of the best noirs I’ve read in ages, and a book that speaks directly to our current political moment. Unfolding over a frenzied forty-eight hours, it follows Lynette as she scrambles to secure enough money to buy the tumbledown residence in Portland, Oregon she shares with her mother and developmentally disabled brother. Lynette hates the house, but she intuitively understands that this one-time-only deal represents her family’s last chance to gain a foothold in a city undergoing turbocharged gentrification; there will be no place left for them if they don’t act at once. Her odyssey plays out like an economically-driven Cornell Woolrich nightmare as she careers into corners of her now-unfamiliar hometown, unable to comprehend how other people make their money or what they spend it on. My dream casting for Lynette if time and space posed no obstacles would be Jennifer Jason Leigh circa her film Georgia (1995), which also offers an unflinching look at the PNW underbelly, so it was gratifying to learn that Leigh will be playing Lynette’s mother, a woman with all hope ground out of her. Starring as Lynette and producing the film is Vanessa Kirby, whose taste and initials cannot be faulted.

The novel made such an impact on me that I interviewed Vlautin for Noir City magazine. It was a fascinating conversation, with Vlautin talking about crime fiction as “the only field that addresses working-class issues in a serious way” and framing Night as a story of “trickledown greed” when “So much of America is based on capitalism over community.” We talked about reading noir fiction, Vlautin saying that he didn’t care for David Goodis when he was in his twenties, “but once you hit your thirties and you’ve got some dents in you that you realize aren’t going to come out, it’s different.” (If you’re interested, that issue of Noir City, maybe the best one I edited, is available in digital and print editions.)

We also discussed music. Vlautin is a recording artist, a member of the alt-country bands Richmond Fontaine and The Delines. That background is essential to his latest novel, The Horse (2024). The movie news bumped it to the top of my TBR pile, and I’m glad it did, because Vlautin managed to break my goddamned heart all over again.

Sixty-something guitar player Al Ward, a veteran of cover bands and casino acts, has retired to an isolated Nevada mining cabin and stripped his life down to the essentials. Every day he writes songs that he’ll never play for anyone, hikes two miles regardless of the weather, and subsists on cans of Campbell’s Soup. This punitive existence, reminiscent of the one Hoke Moseley imposes on himself in Charles Willeford’s infamous samizdat manuscript Grimhaven¹, keeps him away from alcohol, which has ruined him. But not as much as disappointment has.

He was done with stewing over songs until he was half mad. And no matter what he did or how hard he tried, his songs were good but never great. How many notebooks had he filled with half-good songs, songs that were almost? How many hours and months and years had he toiled and tinkered? And Jesus, how many hours had he spent learning cover songs he hated? And why did people always request such horrible songs? And why were the tunes he loved most never popular?

Al is content to run out the clock until the morning a blind horse turns up outside his door—ancient, defenseless, at the mercy of predators and the elements—and Al’s determination to save it forces him to reappraise all the choices he’s made, dating back to the dawn of his days. Yes, Al is acutely aware of how his own situation mirrors that of the misbegotten animal that is suddenly his charge, so much so that he fears he has snapped in his isolation and his mind is “bringing him the saddest thing he could imagine.” Vlautin leans in to the parallels.

He thought of the birth of the horse. 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.

The Horse is about nothing less than how you can leave a legacy when you feel you haven’t made your mark. Al’s life has been about music, the realization that when you’re playing a song, “It gets inside you and maybe, in a way, you get inside it. You can just sorta disappear from everything, and at the end if people are clapping, well, that’s a plus.” But chasing that vanishing act has brought him nothing but missed opportunities and heartache. As Al’s only confidante tells him, “It’s a dark world if you open your eyes at all and aren’t a dumb shit or a Bible-thumping Mormon.” Wise words. There’s other good advice to be gleaned here, about the importance of looking sharp even when you’re feeling low and a reminder that “Nothing good happens in a bar at night to a guy over fifty.” I may follow that first piece of counsel but ignore the second.

This slim, plainspoken volume has the force of a fable, or a song. When I spoke to Vlautin, he said of his own early musical efforts, “I was trying to be cool and punk rock, but I was just a sad ballad guy.” Al is asked why all of his songs are sad and he replies, “They’ve always been that way … I don’t know why exactly, but that’s the way they come out.” The Horse is a beautiful, bruising, sad ballad of a book, and I loved disappearing into it for a while.

What I’m Watching

Lake George (2024, in theaters and on demand). Fresh out of prison, Don pays a call on his former partner in hope of getting the money he feels he’s owed. His old running buddy says he’ll cough up on one condition: that Don, never a strongarm guy, bump off the bewitching woman who is currently robbing him blind.

The simple set-up, pared-down cast, and road-movie vibe are reminiscent of the indie crime films of the 1990s. Writer/director Jeffrey Reiner made a couple of those at the start of his career. But what sets Lake George apart is that it’s about people of a certain age, who have dents in them that aren’t going to come out. Don is played by Shea Whigham, the indispensable character actor getting a rare lead role. Watching him here made me annoyed that HBO’s Perry Mason reboot isn’t coming back for a third season all over again. And the femme fatale is Carrie Coon, whose character has been playing the game long enough to know she needs to make these last moves count. There’s a smart twist that I should have seen coming, and a lovely nod to Double Indemnity (1944) late. Also, points for the roadside wardrobe changes. Above all, Lake George has the great good sense to let much of the action play out on Whigham’s weathered face.

What I’m Drinking

I’ve never been partial to the perfect Manhattan, with its split of sweet and dry vermouths. On my New York trip I ordered a rye Manhattan, which the waiter misheard as “dry Manhattan,” and I had to chase after him. I accept that this king of cocktails is meant to be sweet, a condition you can temper by changing up vermouths.

But then I learned that New York bartender Joaquín Simó, whose handiwork I sampled at the late, lamented Pouring Ribbons, is a fan of this configuration because of its adaptability. Simó favors bourbon, for starters, and the sweetness the whiskey brings may explain why he opts for a heavier pour of dry vermouth. His sweet vermouth preference is Antica Torino Rosso while mine is Punt e Mes, its boosted bitterness countering any cloying qualities.

Simó’s version won me over. One other essential change: he abandons the traditional cherry garnish in favor of a lemon twist. I can understand why, given the perfect Manhattan’s dryness. The cherry is my favorite part of the cocktail; I have been known to keep several varieties on hand to pair with different vermouths. In Toby Cecchini’s memoir Cosmopolitan: A Bartender’s Life (2003), he rightly grumbles about people who request a twist, saying, “just get the damn cherry in your drink; it’s part of the deal.” But here, the twist is the way to go.

Joaquín Simó’s Perfect Manhattan

• 2 oz. bourbon (Simó suggests Wild Turkey 101, I used Buffalo Trace)

• ¾ oz. dry vermouth (Simó recommends Dolin)

• ½ oz. sweet vermouth (Experiment and go with your favorite)

• 1 dash Angostura bitters

• 1 dash Regans’ orange bitters

Stir. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

1. Yes, I have read the unpublished Grimhaven. No, I’m not going to say how.