![]() ![]() With his elaborate backstory, convenient thesis and issue-prodding love interest, Theo’s story feels machine-tooled. It’s when Brooks resurfaces in the near-present that Horse falters. And at the centre of it all, love story: a boy and his horse. Jarret’s portion of Horse is exactly the novel you’d expect: bloodlines and broodmares farriers and knackeries wild gambles, wild gallops and plantation-era grotesqueries. She brings the same archival confidence and sensory flair to the antebellum racetrack. This book returns the Australian-American novelist to the terrain that won her a Pulitzer prize with March, her 2005 tale of the war-absent father from Little Women. Horse is a tale of America’s inescapable and ever-braided legacies: the mythic and the monstrous.īrooks cut her journalistic teeth on the racing beat, and she knows her way around a horse. Jarret is denied the dignity of his own name Theo is the poshly educated son of diplomats but both are living in policed Black bodies. ![]() Horse moves between Lexington’s record-breaking life and his cultural afterlife between Jarret’s world and Theo’s. The equestrian art of the antebellum south often includes Black stablemen, and Theo is writing his PhD on the dehumanising equivalences these paintings make between man and beast – the gilt-edged boast of ownership. It’s salvaged by Theo, a graduate student with an equine fixation. More than 160 years later, an oil painting of a white-socked horse is dumped on the roadside in Washington DC. “A racehorse is a mirror,” the painter tells Jarret, “and a man sees his own reflection there.” It is the last defiant decade of US slavery, and the boy and the horse will be bought and sold together. Watching him paint is Jarret, an enslaved groom who will tend to the horse until its dying breath. In green-pastured Kentucky in the early 1850s, an itinerant artist – a painter of rich men’s horses – is struck by the beauty of a white-socked foal, and captures the animal on canvas. “It would also need to be about race.” It’s the kind of solemn and virtuous statement that can make a reader wary that unmistakable whiff of good intentions. “As I began to research Lexington’s life, it became clear to me that this novel could not merely be about a racehorse,” Brooks explains in her afterword. But underneath the romance lies a dark inevitability: antebellum horseracing was an industry of white prestige built on the plundered labour of Black horsemen. ![]()
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