book reviews for horse by geraldine brooks

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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Summary and Reviews of Horse by Geraldine Brooks

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

• Historical Fiction
• Washington DC
• Tenn. Va. W.Va. Ky.
• 19th Century
• Contemporary
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Book Summary

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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Reader reviews, bookbrowse review.

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

(Reviewed by Jane McCormack ).

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Beyond the Book

Black jockeys: the foundation of american horse racing.

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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.

Part of Brooks’s project, developed in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, is to show that Theo, despite 21st-century autonomy and a privileged background — he’s the son of diplomats, attended Yale and Oxford and has what a friend calls a “Lord Fauntleroy accent” — can never really relax because of his skin color. (To which some readers may respond: “Duh?”) His former polo teammates called him Caca, Sooty and worse. His neighbor flinches when he tries to help her with a shopping cart — “just a White woman, White-womaning,” he thinks, tamping down his anger. And he first meets his new love interest, Jess, when she thinks he’s stealing her expensive bike. Noticing (speaking of treacle) that Theo’s eyes are “the color and luster of maple syrup,” Jess then castigates herself for “what had been no microaggression but blatant racism.”

Their affair, which starts fumblingly and then takes a hard, melodramatic turn, feels like something of a skeleton mount, merely a place where their professional lives can intersect. Here, Brooks has done considerable homework, and deserves, by my lights, a top grade. Jess manages an osteology prep lab without squeam, cleaning animal carcasses with dermestid beetles; and recovers Lexington from the natural history museum’s attic. Theo is inspired to pursue a new dissertation topic after salvaging the equestrian painting, by a minor equestrian artist named Thomas J. Scott (who also intermittently seizes the narrative and embarks, in Brooks’s imagining, on an interracial gay affair in New Orleans).

Brooks’s chronological and cross-disciplinary leaps are thrilling, and mostly seamless, though there can be a lot of exposition in the dialogue. With the all-access passport granted by historical fiction, she even alights daringly, if perhaps a little superfluously, in the circle of Jackson Pollock, right before the artist died while driving drunk with his mistress.

But this is really a book about the power and pain of words, not pictures: the wrong ones Jess says, fearing insensitivity; the “blinking cursor, tapping like an impatient finger” that Theo and all writers face; the archaic ones Brooks summons for verisimilitude, like “jimberjawed” and “clerestory”; the ones Jarret dare not speak. “Words could be snares,” he thinks. “Less of them you laid out there, less likely they could trap you up.” (Or as Aaron Burr put it in “Hamilton”: “Talk less. Smile more.”) And the ones beloved beasts cannot speak.

Call it a prolonged case of post-“Watership Down” stress disorder, but most books with animal themes make me want to run like hell; chances are the creatures are going to suffer or die at the hands of abusers or predators. In “Horse,” though, Lexington is ennobled by art and science, and roars back from obscurity to achieve the high status of metaphor. It’s us human beings who continue to struggle.

Alexandra Jacobs is a book critic and the author of “Still Here: The Madcap, Nervy, Singular Life of Elaine Stritch.” More about Alexandra Jacobs

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