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Geraldine Brooks

401 pages, Hardcover

First published June 14, 2022

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Geraldine Brooks Probes Racing—and Race—in Her New Historical Novel, Horse

The Pulitzer Prize winner explores the unwritten true tale of America’s most famous racehorse—and uses that story to show how far we need to go in confronting systemic racism.

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Don’t let the title fool you; Geraldine Brooks’s Horse is not Black Beauty for grown-ups. Yes, the title character is one of history’s most famous equine celebrities, a foal named Darley, who later became a pop culture phenomenon called Lexington—and was revered as the fastest horse in the world. But first and foremost, Horse is a thrilling story about humanity in all its ugliness and beauty.

Lexington is one of several characters in the book—the rest of them human—based on real-life figures, as Horse is a product of careful research fleshed out with vivid imagination. It’s a technique that has served Brooks well; she earned a Pulitzer Prize for March, which follows the fictional father in Little Women, based in part on the real-life Bronson Alcott. But while the historic detail in the book is impressive, it’s the fictions filling in the blanks where Brooks’s genius truly shines.

Arguably the central character is Jarrett, the enslaved groom who raised Darley from a foal and risks his own life more than once to protect the horse. In her fascinating afterword, Brooks explains that she was inspired to create Jarrett after reading about a missing painting by equestrian artist T.J. Scott, described in an 1870 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine as depicting Lexington being led by “black Jarrett, his groom.” With no further information about the man available, Brooks took his name and created a complex individual, realizing the true scope of Horse. During her research into 19th-century racing, she found, as she writes in her end note, “this thriving industry was built on the labor and skill of Black horsemen, many of whom were, or had been, enslaved…it became clear to me that this novel could not merely be about a racehorse, it would also need to be about race.”

The lost painting features in the book as well, as Brooks imagines a dramatic and violent history for it that connects characters and time periods. In 1954, Martha Jackson, a female dealer in a male-dominated art world, stumbles upon a similar work that is tangentially involved in the death of Jackson Pollock. In 2019, Jess seeks portraits of Lexington to help reshape his skeleton for an exhibit, and Theo, a Lagos-born, Oxford-educated art historian, finds a cast-off horse painting and begins studying equine art through a post-colonial lens. Examining a portrait of a thoroughbred named Richard Singleton alongside several Black grooms, titled Richard Singleton with Viley’s Harry, Charles, and Lew, Theo thinks that the artist “may have portrayed these men as individuals, but perhaps only in the same clinical way that he exactly documented the splendid musculature of the thoroughbred. It was impossible not to suspect some equivalence between the men and the horse: valued, no doubt, but living by the will of their enslaver, submitting to the whip.” He goes on to notice that, “while the horse had two names, the men had only one.”

Horse unfolds in chapters told from various points of view, and each time the reader is reunited with Jarrett, the chapter bears the name of his enslaver, as the groom might have been described in a painting’s title: Warfield’s Jarrett, Ten Broeck’s Jarrett, Alexander’s Jarrett. It’s a device that forces the reader to consider a world in which gifted horses are valued more than human beings. And that’s not the only big question Horse asks. At a research facility studying the declining population of North Atlantic whales, Jess muses on “the artistry and the ingenuity of our own species,” and wonders, “How could we be so creative and destructive at the same time?” But far from being a preachy cautionary tale about man’s inhumanity to man and beast, this novel is a page-turner that reads like a series of mysteries: Who is this horse? Who was his groom? What happened to their shared portrait?

While those explorations drive the plot, it’s the voices of the different characters, each so distinct, that make the novel as delightful to read as it is thought-provoking. In 2019, Jess thinks, “careers can be as accidental as car wrecks.… Not many girls from Burwood Road in western Sydney got to go to French Guiana and bounce through the rainforest with scorpion specimens pegged across the jeep like so much drying laundry.” In 1854, Jarrett observes that “to be spoken of as livestock was as bitter as a gallnut.” And that same year, the equine painter, gambler, and sometime reporter Thomas J. Scott muses, “Modest winnings, payments for reportage—as ever, paltry and laggard—would not have kept me long in New Orleans, a city whose ample pleasures are a constant tax upon the purse.” The care with which Brooks crafts each character’s voice is a plea to look past the categorical labels and legends with which we describe each other, to truly see the individual. Paired with a compelling plot, the evocative voices create a story so powerful, reading it feels like watching a neck-and-neck horse race, galloping to its conclusion—you just can’t look away.

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by Geraldine Brooks

Reviewed by bailey sincox.

“Historical fiction” may be one name for Geraldine Brooks’s craft, but that label doesn’t do her novels justice. Her Pulitzer Prize-winner, March (2005) , spotlights the taciturn father from Little Women. A transcendentalist compelled to enter the Union Army, he is a man of ideas struggling to become a man of action. People of the Book (2008) follows a Jewish manuscript from medieval Spain to modern Bosnia through exile, conflict, and genocide. Brooks’s novels don’t just use history as backdrop; they plumb the depths of the past in search of wisdom for the present.

Horse brings together the best parts of Brooks’s earlier work. It combines March ’s focus on the American Civil War with People of the Book ’s multiple narrators. Like March , Horse focuses on a character, while also centering on objects, like People of the Book .

The title refers to the label on a skeleton gathering dust in the Smithsonian’s attic. As it turns out, “Horse” is as much of a misnomer for Lexington, called “the greatest thoroughbred stud sire in racing history,” as “historical fiction” is for Horse. In Washington, D.C. in 2019, Jess, a zoologist, is called to restore Lexington’s newly-identified bones for public display. She collaborates with Theo, an art historian, who finds a painting of a horse in his neighbor’s garbage. This is the premise for Brooks’s latest transhistorical, when-worlds-collide plot.

Jess and Theo’s stories are interspersed with that of Jarret, Lexington’s groom, during the 1850s and 60s. Born into slavery in Kentucky, Jarret bonds with a colt called Lexington, setting out to prove that “all men are equal on the turf or under it” and hoping to win enough at the races to purchase his freedom. Lexington grows famous for his speed and endurance under Jarret’s care, but, by 1854, “the enmity is grown so great that even the turf provides no neutral ground.” Sold, along with Lexington, first to a New Orleans entrepreneur, then back to Kentucky, Jarret watches the Civil War unfold from the South’s elite stables. In 2019, Jess and Theo know nothing about Jarret. Nevertheless, they use the evidence they have to reconstruct his world.

In Horse, Brooks examines what others have overlooked. Like Horse ’s protagonists, she rummages through what looks like junk, searching for treasure. Jess rescues Lexington’s bones and “articulates” them; Theo salvages the painting to restore it. These objects carry traces of the past that need to be studied in order to be understood—and in order for their full stories to be told.

Part Da Vinci Code and part Nickel Boys, Horse draws readers into a historical mystery: what made Lexington so great? If he was so great, why was he forgotten? ( Seabiscuit gets a shoutout, too.) In its search for answers, the novel wavers between awe and indignation. While many of the novel’s characters are historical figures (abolitionist Cassius Clay, art dealer Martha Jackson, Lexington himself), Jarret is just a figure in a painting—the painting of Lexington “led by Black Jarret, his groom” recorded in an artist’s catalogue. A painting that’s now lost.

At the novel’s heart, then, is a more important question: how did we forget about Jarret? The bitter fact of knowing more about the horse than the man is not lost on Brooks. She elevates the history of Black grooms, trainers, and jockeys even as she underscores the disturbing interchangeability of the men with the horses they rode. When the New Orleans horse racing impresario Ten Broek says “this [ … ] is my Jarret. He knows the horse. Follow his advice in every particular, as if his instructions were my own,” Jarret “trie[s] to ignore the dissonant clanging of Ten Broeck’s words. My horse. My Jarret. New grandstands, new barns—did the man just buy up everything he wanted in this world?” This is Horse ’s strength: it depicts dignity and indignity at once. It asks readers to remember the passion and expertise Black men brought to the sport of horse racing and to recognize the violence that kept them out of its official record. As the novel shows, the horse whose legacy is preserved in museums, art galleries, and stud catalogues would not exist if not for the man whose life is irrecoverable except through fiction.

Horse may be better on the past than the present. The novel’s attempts to depict the Black Lives Matter movement and other current events can be clunky. But its spirit of humility and humanity prevails. Words directed at a collector buying Lexington’s painting may as well be directed at Brooks: “I guess you like horses.” Like her, Brooks responds: “It’s far more complicated than that.” Horse shows us just how complicated it is.

Published on September 6, 2022

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In ‘Horse,’ Geraldine Brooks Sets a Consideration of Race at the Track

Brooks’s latest novel focuses on two young Black men, and shuttles between the present day and the 19th-century world of horse racing.

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By Alexandra Jacobs

HORSE By Geraldine Brooks 401 pages. Viking. $28.

The title of Geraldine Brooks’s new novel, “Horse,” alludes to Lexington: the real and extraordinary late-19th-century Kentucky bay stallion who drives its plot. The subtext, if not the subtitle, is “Race.” Not for the contests Lexington won, though those are recreated in detail suitable for both the sports and society pages, but for the book’s confrontation of relations between Black and white people over the course of two centuries.

Valuable legacies can disappear, is the underlying message — for years, this celebrity thoroughbred’s skeleton languished at the Smithsonian, shoved in an attic and marked only equus caballus — even as barbaric ones linger.

A wide-ranging practitioner of historical fiction and adventuresome journalism, Brooks has visited the rocky terrain of race before. Her novel “March” (2005) explored the life of the mostly absent father from Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” a chaplain for the Union Army during the Civil War. In The New York Times, Brooks’s similarly accomplished contemporary, Thomas Mallon (a white man), criticized her (a white woman), for populating that book with a number of “slave saints and savants” in supporting roles, calling the result “treacly and embarrassing.” Others disagreed , and “March” went on to win a Pulitzer Prize.

This time, after novels about Judaism , the first Native American to graduate from Harvard and the biblical King David , Brooks focuses on two young Black men, giving them richly layered backgrounds and complicated inner lives (in an afterword, she thanks among others her son Bizu, whom she and her late husband, the author Tony Horwitz , adopted from Ethiopia, for insight into the modern Black experience).

The book opens with Theo, a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Georgetown who pulls a painting of Lexington out of a hostile neighbor’s trash in 2019. In short order, the action zooms back to 1850 and Jarret, a skilled groom whose enslaved father had bought his own freedom but couldn’t afford his son’s.

The character of Jarret was inspired by a fleeting reference in an old issue of Harper’s Magazine, informed by Brooks’s research on enslaved horse trainers, who had — tenuously — more authority and status on the turf than their counterparts in the fields. His progress through the novel is propelled by disquieting transfers of ownership: he comes of age as “Warfield’s Jarret”; is both empowered and imperiled as “Ten Broeck’s Jarret”; and so on, through emancipation. Tenderly devoted to the prize horse first known as Darley, he also tangles warily with Cassius Marcellus Clay, the hotheaded, philandering abolitionist and one of Clay’s daughters, Mary Barr. Mary always seems to be creeping up on Jarret in an organza frock: well-meaning, with an interest that comes to verge on the romantic, but putting him at risk by her very presence.

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Summary and Reviews of Horse by Geraldine Brooks

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

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• First Published:
• Jun 14, 2022, 416 pages
• Jan 2024, 464 pages

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Winner of the 2022 BookBrowse Fiction Award A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history.

Kentucky, 1850 . An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamor of any racetrack. New York City, 1954 . Martha Jackson, a gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters, becomes obsessed with a nineteenth-century equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance. Washington, DC, 2019 . Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse—one studying the stallion's bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success. Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, Horse is a novel of art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism.

THEO Georgetown, Washington, DC 2019

The deceptively reductive forms of the artist's work belie the density of meaning forged by a bifurcated existence. These glyphs and ideograms signal to us from the crossroads: freedom and slavery, White and Black, rural and urban. No. Nup. That wouldn't do. It reeked of PhD. This was meant to be read by normal people. Theo pressed the delete key and watched the letters march backward to oblivion. All that was left was the blinking cursor, tapping like an impatient finger. He sighed and looked away from its importuning. Through the window above his desk, he noticed that the elderly woman who lived in the shabby row house directly across the street was dragging a bench press to the curb. As the metal legs screeched across the pavement, Clancy raised a startled head and jumped up, putting his front paws on the desk beside Theo's laptop. His immense ears, like radar dishes, twitched toward the noise. Together, Theo and the dog ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• On page 28 (Theo, Georgetown, Washington, DC, 2019), Theo reflects that depictions of horses are among the oldest art humans created. The book's epigraphs reflect on the significance of Lexington—in his day, an even bigger celebrity than Seabiscuit or Secretariat. Discuss the enduring human fascination with horses—do they move you more than other animals, and if so, why?
• Theo and Jess are both obsessed with their rarefied fields of expertise. Does the author manage to convey why these unusual careers can be so compelling? If so, how?
• Jarret's connection with horses is presented as stronger than his bonds with people. How does his love for and dedication to Lexington help or hamper his coming of age and his transformation ...
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Geraldine Brooks creates a powerful backstory for 19th-century thoroughbred racehorse Lexington, weaving a rich tapestry of historical and current-day narratives that aptly reflect how the legacy of slavery still ripples through America. The historic underpinnings of the work are as spellbinding as the characters. Whether Brooks is chronicling the history of thoroughbred racing, exploring the impact of the Civil War on African American jockeys, or detailing the nuances of American equestrian art, it is all equally engrossing... continued

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(Reviewed by Jane McCormack ).

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Black jockeys: the foundation of american horse racing.

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‘Horse’ unfolds a riveting tale of a champion thoroughbred and his enslaved trainer

“Horse,” by Geraldine Brooks, melds a historic tale of an enslaved Black horse trainer with a modern-day story of interracial romance. 

• By Heller McAlpin Contributor

June 14, 2022, 5:59 p.m. ET

Geraldine Brooks' “Horse” circles two tracks: one a riveting historical novel about a talented, enslaved Black horse trainer and his charge, the famous white-footed racehorse named Lexington, the other a contemporary story about an interracial romance between two characters who connect over their interest in the horse. The result is a book not just about a racehorse, but about race.

While not as well known today as Seabiscuit, Lexington was a champion who became "the greatest thoroughbred stud sire in racing history." His 575 foals included many Belmont and Preakness winners, including Preakness himself. 

Brooks, clearly a horse lover, explores a fascinating sidebar to history that highlights how the lucrative business of horse racing was deeply entwined with the institution of slavery in the pre-Civil War South. The skilled Black grooms, trainers, and jockeys – many of whom were enslaved – have yet to be given their due. Her sensitive, deeply researched novel is a welcome step toward correcting the historical record.

Jarret, Lexington's devoted groom and trainer, is the most compelling and wholly realized character, albeit largely imagined due to what Brooks says in her afterward is woeful lack of documentation about him. But from the moment we meet him in 1850, on the day of Lexington's conception on a Kentucky horse farm called The Meadows, he's a hero who is easy to root for.  

At 13, Jarret is already a horse-whisperer who has demonstrated a rare, gentle affinity with even the most difficult horses. He assists his father, Harry Lewis, the head trainer, who foresaw the advantages of combining the violent stud Boston's pedigree with that of the ornery mare Alice Corneal. Harry has managed to buy his own freedom but is still saving to pay for his son's, and is excited when his boss, Dr. Elisha Warfield, promises him an interest in the bay colt in lieu of a year's wages. But as the value of both Lexington and Jarret increase, freedom recedes out of reach.

Brooks frames the intertwined history of Jarret and Lexington with a modern-day love story between Jess, an Australian-born zoologist who is restoring Lexington's skeleton to exhibit at the Smithsonian, and Theo, a doctoral student in art history who rescues what turns out to be a valuable portrait of Lexington and his trainer from his neighbor's trash. Unfortunately, their interest in the horse is more convincing than their interest in each other, which seems engineered to provide a platform on which to address racial issues.   

Theo, the son of two diplomats – a Yoruba mother and an American father – grew up all over the world and played polo at Oxford. He is no stranger to racist slights, and in fact, on his first encounter with Jess outside the Smithsonian, where he has taken his treasure to be identified, she accuses him of trying to steal her bike when she sees him bent over the lock of his own identical model. He calmly points to hers, further down the rack.

The painting, he learns, is by Thomas J. Scott, an itinerant equine artist trained by Edward Troye, the pre-eminent Swiss-born horse portraitist of his era. Scott was hired by wealthy patrons to capture their champions on canvas before equestrian portraiture was succeeded by photography following the Civil War. 

Theo is particularly excited to have found a portrait of a top-hatted Black person "depicted possessing a dignified authority." The groom's self-assured deportment upends Theo's proposed thesis on Africans in British art, based on Frederick Douglass' contention that white artists "couldn't see past their own ingrained stereotypes of Blackness."  

In a narrative that smoothly jumps between multiple strands in both past and present, Brooks weaves in the story of the mutual esteem that grows between the white painter Scott and the Black groom Jarret, in part based on their shared respect for horses' feelings. Scott notes that while Black people aren't allowed to own racehorses, there's no law against having a picture of a horse, and twice gives paintings of Lexington to Jarret. 

Tracing the path of Scott's canvases leads to yet another fascinating (and partially true) strand of Brooks' book, which involves a New York art dealer named Martha Jackson, who, in exchange for a couple of Jackson Pollock's paintings, traded the sports car in which Pollock later died. Upon her own death, the art dealer's bequest to the Smithsonian included a portrait of Lexington by Scott, an anachronism among her modern collection. Brooks invents a lovely story to explain how she came to own it.

Brooks, who wrote about the Civil War in her powerful 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "March," takes readers to some dark places in “Horse.” Whether on a Louisiana plantation's cotton field in the 1850s, a brutal rebel raid in war-torn Kentucky, or following a Black man just going about his business in contemporary Washington, she never lets us forget the ongoing scourge of racism.  

You can always bet on Brooks to deliver a smart, eye-opening read. But without giving away too much, I should warn readers that by piling on a galling contemporary event meant to underscore America's terrible history of bigotry, she overloads “Horse” with more than it can comfortably carry. That said, not just horse lovers will be enthralled by this often heart-pounding novel about the legacy of a remarkable thoroughbred.

Heller McAlpin reviews books regularly for the Monitor, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR.

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

by Geraldine Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 14, 2022

Strong storytelling in service of a stinging moral message.

A long-lost painting sets in motion a plot intertwining the odyssey of a famed 19th-century thoroughbred and his trainer with the 21st-century rediscovery of the horse’s portrait.

In 2019, Nigerian American Georgetown graduate student Theo plucks a dingy canvas from a neighbor’s trash and gets an assignment from Smithsonian magazine to write about it. That puts him in touch with Jess, the Smithsonian’s “expert in skulls and bones,” who happens to be examining the same horse's skeleton, which is in the museum's collection. (Theo and Jess first meet when she sees him unlocking an expensive bike identical to hers and implies he’s trying to steal it—before he points hers out further down the same rack.) The horse is Lexington, “the greatest racing stallion in American turf history,” nurtured and trained from birth by Jarret, an enslaved man who negotiates with this extraordinary horse the treacherous political and racial landscape of Kentucky before and during the Civil War. Brooks, a White writer, risks criticism for appropriation by telling portions of these alternating storylines from Jarret’s and Theo’s points of view in addition to those of Jess and several other White characters. She demonstrates imaginative empathy with both men and provides some sardonic correctives to White cluelessness, as when Theo takes Jess’ clumsy apology—“I was traumatized by my appalling behavior”—and thinks, “Typical….He’d been accused, yet she was traumatized.” Jarret is similarly but much more covertly irked by well-meaning White people patronizing him; Brooks skillfully uses their paired stories to demonstrate how the poison of racism lingers. Contemporary parallels are unmistakable when a Union officer angrily describes his Confederate prisoners as “lost to a narrative untethered to anything he recognized as true.…Their fabulous notions of what evils the Federal government intended for them should their cause fail…was ingrained so deep, beyond the reach of reasonable dialogue or evidence.” The 21st-century chapters’ shocking denouement drives home Brooks’ point that too much remains the same for Black people in America, a grim conclusion only slightly mitigated by a happier ending for Jarret.

Pub Date: June 14, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-39-956296-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION

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Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.

The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.

Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022

ROMANCE | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE | GENERAL FICTION

More by Colleen Hoover

by Colleen Hoover

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

More by Kristin Hannah

by Kristin Hannah

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Geraldine Brooks' novel 'Horse' reckons with racism past and present

A 19th-century American illustration of horse racing (Library of Congress)

by Winifred Morgan

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In Horse , author Geraldine Brooks' control of her craft is on full display. Her multiple plots and sets of characters collaborate to achieve a single effect — an effect that is itself unsettling. Readers will come away from the novel wondering at the intransigence of racism in America and, if they are people of faith, uncomfortable with the fact that worship groups have not done a better job of denting the self-interest that helps racism hold sway in the U.S.

The novel weaves three main stories: that of an enslaved person tending to a colt who becomes a phenomenal racehorse; that of a Nigerian American grad student who, having happened upon a lost painting of the horse, makes Lexington the focus of his dissertation; and that of the horse itself.

Two other lives, those of a 19th-century portrait painter and a 20th-century gallery owner, support these central stories, functioning as connective tissue to the horse's portrait. Slavery and its residue — racism — are at the core of the novel.

Even Lexington, thought to be the fastest horse ever, is affected by racism and greed. On the one hand, he is cosseted by his owners and valued for his unparalleled speed and will to win. On the other, as a commodity, he is destined to be literally run to death. A fluke saves him: For a while, a white trainer's vanity refuses to allow a diligent black groom to care for the horse. That leads to Lexington's eventual blindness but also saves him from what would have been his fate.

Geraldine Brooks, author of the novel Horse (Courtesy of geraldinebrooks.com)

Brooks immerses readers in 19th-century horse racing. The races of the period featured grueling 4-mile heats — and sometimes more than one. Sports newspapers covering horse races had better circulation than most other newspapers. Winning horses were better known and admired than most public figures. Gambling was rampant. The egos of wealthy and powerful owners were involved. Modern-day American football or worldwide soccer probably offer the best comparisons to the sport as it existed during the mid-19th century.

The choice of the book's title is a curious one. Seemingly, it refers to Lexington, the horse who holds the narratives together. But the lack of an article makes the word generic, perhaps referring to all horses, and broadens horse to mean any and all who function as Lexington does. His successive owners' treatment of Lexington parallels their relationship with their enslaved human beings.

Lexington's life alters the lives of Brooks' two central African American characters, Jarret and Theo, living a century and a half apart. In what seem at first unconnected chapters, Brooks switches from one man's story to the other.

Jarret is a young enslaved man dedicated to the horse's care and the son of a formerly enslaved father hoping to buy Jarret's freedom. In contrast, Theo is a 21st-century African American son of diplomats who has benefitted from an international upbringing and privileged education.

Enslavement dictates both Lexington's and Jarret's lives. The novel is full of telling details: Jarret's father, once enslaved but also a superb trainer, is a very short man. His growth was purposely stunted by forced childhood malnutrition so that he'd be light enough to be a jockey. As a matter of course, Jarret is sent along whenever Lexington is sold, his name changing with each new owner. Both horse and man have had their names changed to suit their owner's preferences.

Slavery has a long and ignominious history with variations throughout the world, and that history has and continues to be exposed through literature, as evidenced by the cultural waves of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in the 19th century. Brooks takes a more subtle approach in Horse , refusing to exaggerate circumstances in either the antebellum or contemporary periods and choosing instead to create deeply human characters whom readers come to root for naturally.

Set squarely within the reality of the modern world, Horse demands its readers face the racism that still damages and regularly destroys human beings.

Brooks' contemporary characters inhabit the same world as George Floyd, Elon Musk and her readers. The slights and threats Theo meets are real and dangerous, and readers register the care Theo takes to avoid misinterpretation. Unfailingly polite, he wears a Georgetown sweatshirt when he goes jogging to identify himself as a local who belongs in the mostly white neighborhood.

Black friends from his undergraduate years have warned him that, having grown up abroad in Australia and Nigeria, he needs to be less quick to help, less trusting. He is irked but not surprised when a woman assumes he's trying to steal her bike that looks like his.

By paralleling Jarett's and Theo's stories, Brooks makes clear that, in racism, slavery's residue continues to haunt the U.S. Amber Ruffin has recounted being accused of soliciting prostitution as she sat in a car with a white friend. One of my fellow Dominicans recently told me about her fright while staying in a white neighborhood, when a policeman accused her of masquerading as a religious sister.

Such anecdotes are so far from the experience of most whites that they can seem unfathomable; but through fiction a reader experiences a touch of what many people encounter every day.

Realistic fiction such as Brooks' novel offers readers vicarious experience and encourages them to move beyond an intellectual conclusion to an emotional reaction. When characters we relate to encounter events like those we see in the news, readers may consider how we can change ourselves and alter the larger world.

Biblical scholars often remind readers that the word traditionally translated into English as "repentance" meant something closer to a "change of perspective" in the early Greek texts of the Bible. Thus, the prophets and early disciples were urging their listeners to see the world from a new angle — and, of course, to reconsider their own actions. Fiction can propel us to do the same today.

Brooks' Horse is "a good read," full of well-written scenes, engaging action and likeable characters. Yet after readers finish the last satisfying page, they may well reflect on the disconcerting similarities between the stories set in the historical past and the contemporary setting of today.

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Book Review: Horse

By Geraldine Brooks ’83JRN. (Viking)

A story of present-day interracial romance woven together with a history of thoroughbred racing in the antebellum South, Horse , a new novel by Geraldine Brooks ’83JRN, is no safe bet. Yet readers who appreciate rigorous historical research and polished storytelling should certainly stay the course.

The novel opens in Washington, DC, where art historian Theo is rescuing a painting of Lexington, one of America’s most renowned racehorses, from his neighbor’s trash. Theo takes the artwork to the Smithsonian for evaluation and is introduced to Jess, who is restoring the skeleton of the same horse for an exhibit. The encounter is awkward: Theo, who is Black, recognizes Jess as the white woman who had earlier confronted him when she thought he was stealing her bike. Weeks later, when the couple begin to fall in love, Theo will wonder how to answer the question of how they met, since “being tacitly accused of bike theft wasn’t exactly a meet cute.”

The action then shifts to 1850, to the day Lexington is born on the Kentucky farm of the physician Elisha Warfield. Warfield promises Harry Lewis, a talented Black trainer, an interest in the racehorse in lieu of a year’s wages — an exciting prospect, since Lewis hopes to use any future winnings to buy the freedom of his son Jarret, whom Warfield has enslaved. Jarret proves to be as talented as his father. He spends all his waking hours with the horse, and through hard work and unwavering commitment he eventually raises one of the greatest racing stallions in turf history. Unfortunately, his father will never live to see or profit from this achievement.

Brooks is known for undertaking extensive research, and in the novel’s afterword she says that as she pored over archives she was struck by the stories of the Black grooms, trainers, and jockeys who played a “central role in the wealth creation of the antebellum thoroughbred industry.” These key figures, of course, are hidden in the margins of history, a place Brooks is always eager to explore. Her novel March , which won a Pulitzer Prize, imagined the Civil War experiences of chaplain John March, the fictional father of the girls in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women . Caleb’s Crossing , set in 1665, told the story of the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College.

Horse shifts between Jarret in 1850 and Theo and Jess in 2019 (with a whistle stop in New York City in the 1950s), and it carries the heavy burden of acknowledging the deep roots and painful persistence of structural racism. Jarret averts his eyes when he is asked for his opinion, acknowledging that “it wasn’t a good idea to speak to a White stranger without putting a deal of thought into it. Words could be snares.” One hundred and seventy years later, Theo, the Oxford-educated, polo-playing son of civil servants, cannot escape the racist tropes that pollute the most mundane interactions. When he goes to help a neighbor with her shopping, she flinches with alarm. “Theo felt the usual gust of anger and took a deep breath. Just a White woman, White-womaning.”

Geraldine Brooks, of course, is also a white woman, writing from the perspective of an enslaved man and a multiracial student confronting the disappointing limits of “woke” culture. It’s a bold choice for a novelist, especially when debates over cultural appropriation in fiction are heated and divisive. Brooks seems aware of the risk. In the novel, Theo’s own thesis takes issue with Frederick Douglass’s argument “that no true portraits of Africans by White artists existed; that White artists couldn’t see past their own ingrained stereotypes of Blackness.” In the afterword, Brooks takes pains to point out that she sought insights into the contemporary Black experience from several early readers, including Bizu Horwitz, the son she and her husband, the late journalist Tony Horwitz ’83JRN, adopted from Ethiopia.

Brooks’s novel started out as a story about a racehorse, but as she began to research the history of thoroughbred racing in America, Brooks writes, “it became clear that this novel could not merely be about a racehorse, it would also need to be about race.” And in the end, the novel is all about race. Despite the book’s title, the horse, Lexington, becomes less of a major character and more of an also-ran, and by making that choice, the novelist raised the stakes.

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The novel 'horse' is the story of an enslaved man grooming a winning thoroughbred.

Lexington was a winning thoroughbred in the mid-1800's, and the basis of Geraldine Brooks' new novel, "Horse." Scott Simon talks with her about her story.

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How To Read the Slough House (Slow Horses) Books in Order

With a new season of Slow Horses streaming on Apple TV+, now is as good of a time as any to look at the books that inspired the series. The Slough House novels by Mick Herron are a great read, so here is how to read all of them in order.

How To Read the Slough House Books in Order

Book 1: Slow Horses

Slow Horses is the first book in the series and is the basis for the first season of the TV show. The novel does an excellent job of introducing us to our main cast of characters, including the head of Slough House, Jackson Lamb, for the first time. It involves the Slow Horses getting dragged into a hostage situation manufactured by MI6 that goes south.

Book 2: Dead Lions

The series’ second book focuses on Jackson Lamb and his crew’s encounter with Cicada’s Russian Sleeper agents from the Cold War. It’s an exhilarating thriller that won the CWA Gold Dagger Award winner and is the focus of the show’s second season.

Book 3: Real Tigers

The third season of Slow Horses is an adaptation of Real Tigers, and the third book involves River and Louisa, two Slow Horses, becoming trapped in an MI6 bomb bunker that’s been transformed into a file archive with a rogue agent. A Tiger Team is sent in to kill the rogue agent and the Slow Horses as they are embroiled in yet another conspiracy that goes all the way to the top of MI6.

Book 4: Spook Street

The fourth season of Slow Horses , which has just started being released, adapts the fourth book in the series. Spook Street posits the question: what happens when an old agent who knows too much begins to lose his mind slowly? The old agent in question is River’s grandfather, who begins to lose his grip on reality right when dark forces from his past come to silence him before he reveals too much.

Book 5: London Rules

The fifth book in the series, London Rules , focuses on a series of terror attacks that have MI6 and the First Desk, particularly, facing harsh and heavy criticism. Roddy Ho, one of the least liked but funniest characters in the series, is at the center of this book, as his narrow escape from one of the terror attacks soon becomes anything but a coincidence.

Related: All Major Actors & Cast List for Slow Horses Season 4

Book 6: Joe Country

The sixth book of the Slough House novels, Joe Country, is something of a continuation of book four, with villain Frank Harkness reappearing. The Slow Horses have a score to settle with Frank after his machinations in Book 4 left one of their own dead, and what follows is a tumultuous and deadly game of cat-and-mouse in Joe Country under the backdrop of snowy and ice-cold terrain.

Book 7: Slough House

The seventh book in the series finds the Slow Horses seemingly wiped from service records, and each member of Slough House is followed, as it seems that the infamous wing of MI6 may be closed down in the darkest way possible.

Book 8: Bad Actors

The latest full-length novel in the Slough House series, Bad Actors , is filled with dark humor and intense political intrigue involving Russian intelligence agents who have seemingly snuck onto British soil.

Book 9: Standing By The Wall

The latest entry in the Slough House book series, Standing By The Wall , is a collection of novellas that take place in between the main books, with the last short story in this book taking place after the Bad Actors novel, making it the latest entry in the series and something you’ll want to pick up if you’ve finished the main series of books.

Bonus: The Secret Hours

Mick Herron’s latest book is a seemingly standalone novel unconnected to the Slough House series. However, eagle-eyed and observant fans of the series will want to pick this book up, as its connections to the broader world of Slow Horses and its critical characters are as intriguing as they are revelatory.

And that’s how to read the Slough House books in order.

Slow Horses is streaming now on Apple TV+.

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'The Friend' Review: Naomi Watts Comedy Is Best When It Goes to the Dogs | TIFF 2024

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Early in The Friend , the adaptation of Sigrid Nunez ’s National Book Award winner by writers/directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel , a character asks “What’s gonna happen with the dog?” It’s a question we always ask in movies centered around dogs, afraid that we’re gonna get Marley’d or Old Yeller’ed and become a weepy mess at the end of the film. But while The Friend is about tragedy, loss, and grief, have no fear, the dog is fine. In fact, the dog is the one who’s depressed!

What Is 'The Friend' About?

Walter ( Bill Murray ) was a close friend and mentor to Iris ( Naomi Watts ), before he committed suicide. Walter was a celebrated author, who was married three times, and the owner of a massive Great Dane named Apollo. With the passing of Walter, Iris is left picking up the pieces of his life, whether it's dealing with those three wives or working with his recently discovered daughter ( Sarah Pidgeon ) on putting together a book of Walter’s correspondences during his life. But the biggest issue that Walter left behind is Apollo, who Walter wanted Iris to take care of after his passing. Iris doesn’t know what to do, since her Manhattan apartment doesn’t allow dogs, but wanting to honor his wishes, she brings the dog home with her.

But Apollo is clearly grieving his former owner. Apollo takes up residence on Iris’ bed, with one of Walter’s old shirts constantly by his side, as his big, sad eyes show that he misses his best friend. As Iris tries to figure out what to do with this massive dog she’s not allowed to have , and how to proceed with the book on Walter’s life, she starts to form a bond with Apollo, as the two deal with the loss of Walter in their own ways.

'The Friend' Is Best When It's About Naomi Watts and a Big-Ass Dog

The Friend is primarily about the growing bond between a dog and its owner , and as this strengthens, the film similarly grows stronger. McGehee and Siegel take a very light comedic approach to this subject matter, and while it’s never laugh-out-loud funny, it’s quite often charming in its way. While The Friend has Iris trying to reckon with Walter’s death, exploring his legacy with his book, and reckoning with the wives of Walter, it’s the parts when the film focuses on Iris and Apollo that truly matter.

For Watts, this is a role that asks her to explore depression and loss, but primarily by playing against a dog the size of a small horse. The fact that she can pull off these feelings effectively makes this one of her finest performances in years , even when the story does occasionally fall into melodrama and cliché. But to be fair, Watts’ scene partner, Apollo (played by Bing, giving an all-time great dog performance), is giving her plenty to work with. His big, sad eyes are presenting every feeling that Iris isn’t stating, a sorrow that is deep and unpredictable. Apollo is a perfect sympathetic companion, an external manifestation of emotions that Iris isn’t ready to explore about herself quite yet.

It’s when The Friend gets away from this bond that the film isn’t as compelling. Iris’ attempts to get a book going about Walter aren’t nearly as interesting as the movie seems to think it is, and Iris’ interactions with the wives, played by Carla Gugino , Constance Wu , and Noma Dumezweni , don't really go anywhere. It’s almost as if whenever Iris and Apollo aren’t on the screen together, the film gets significantly less interesting. It’s when it gets away from this core relationship that the privilege of Iris’ situation starts to come out, creating problems that don’t seem all that important in the grand scheme of things. For example, the way The Friend wraps up Iris’ issue with keeping Apollo in her apartment is an easy solution, and one that showcases her ability to cheat the system meant to help others for her own means. The Friend wants to be a human drama, but it only truly succeeds when it’s also a drama about a dog .

Thankfully, when the film focuses on this bond between Iris and Apollo, it’s usually based in this exploration of loss that Iris can’t explain and Apollo obviously can’t vocalize. Even when they’re sitting in silence together, we know the weight that is pressing down on both of them . When The Friend comes out and has Watts’ narrating her grief, explaining what she’s feeling, and writing through the loss of Walter, it always feels more forced than just allowing Iris and Apollo to quietly sit with these feelings in their own way.

'The Friend' Doesn't Know When to Quit

Siegel and McGehee, who previously directed What Maisie Knew and Montana Story , effectively tell this story, but it is not without its bumps. The way The Friend is shot is, at times, far too saccharine , almost as if it’s getting ready to fall into the tropes of those aforementioned tragic dog films, before pulling back. It’s a style that makes this story a bit more generic than it should be. And again, while the script, also by Siegel and McGehee, often hits on lovely moments when it sticks to the bond between dog and new owner, it’s frequently overwritten and exhausting in its exploration of its themes. For example, The Friend seems like it’s going towards one obvious conclusion, but then keeps going and going, with more potential endings than Return of the King . The Friend diverts from the book’s ending, and almost acts like it’s trying to write its way through making this decision.

The Friend is solid when it focuses on Iris and Apollo the dog, and falters whenever it gets away from that core relationship. McGehee and Siegel's adaptation is strong when it keeps things simple, but too often, it attempts to be as literary as the book, overwriting these concepts and hurting itself in the process. The Friend 's heart is in the right place, but it can't get out of its own way.

The Friend works best when its subtly exploring grief through a dog and its new owner, but often gets away from that relationship and overwrites these ideas a bit too much.

• Naomi Watts' Iris and Astro the dog are a lovely pair.
• The Friend often hits on solid discussions of grief and the struggle with losing someone.
• The Friend takes a while to latch onto this owner/dog dynamic and falters when it gets away from it.
• The film struggles with finding the right ending and instead gives quite a few.

The Friend screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.

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