Horse

by Geraldine Brooks

Brooks, a best-known author of historical fiction and Pulitzer Prize awardee for March, entices us with a story of racing and race.

Horse opens in the present day, introducing us to the two main contemporary figures, a young white Smithsonian scientist, Jess, and black art historian graduate student, Theo, whose lives intersect over a horse skeleton and a painting retrieved from a trash bin, both from the antebellum era.

Flash back to 1850 Kentucky and we meet 13 year-old Jarret, an enslaved boy living as a groom, and subsequent trainer to Lexington, a real life thoroughbred of the era who would go on to win multiple racing trophies and sire hundreds of racing stars including three who won the Preakness.

Brooks said she knew she could not write a book about this racehorse without writing about race and the enslaved black boys and men (mostly) of the era who performed every chore surrounding the horses from muck raking the stalls to grooming, training, and jockeying, almost solely without pay or recognition from their owners and chronicled within the Turf newspapers of the day.

Jarret, whose character was a true person but due to incomplete information about him is a composite of real black trainers, especially Harry Lewis and Ansel Williamson.  His relationship with Lexington is the best developed in the book.   Brooks’ beautiful prose conveys Jarret’s  love and horse whisperer sense for Lexington and Lexington’s response to Jarret’s presence and every move.

Brooks weaves the stories of these main characters as well as that of Thomas J. Scott who painted Lexington and other horses of the era and Martha Jackson, a gallery owner and modern art collector in the 50’s.  While an interesting aside, the injection of Martha Jackson could probably have been left out.

A hallmark of Brooks’ work has always been the intensive research into her subject matter and is evidenced here no less in her descriptions of contemporary science methods to unearth secrets of animal skeletons as well as the laborious nature of art restoration.  In addition, her portrayal of the importance of horse racing in the era is filled with descriptive detail and she works hard at writing for the black enslaved workers of that day.  As to critical questioning of whether she, a white woman, could adequately portray the black experience she has responded: “In journalism, you often know more than you can write;  you have an instinct, but you can’t use it.  But in a novel, that instinct is the story.  You get to the line of fact and you can take a swan dive into (‘it might have been like this’).”

Brooks has just received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Horse “that confronts racism and explores diversity.”

We in our book group, as always, had a good discussion.  Whether we give a thumbs up or down, we always learn from each other’s insights and comments.

Nancy Crowley