The novel is full of telling details: Jarret's father, once enslaved but also a superb trainer, is a very short man. In contrast, Theo is a 21st-century African American son of diplomats who has benefitted from an international upbringing and privileged education.Įnslavement dictates both Lexington's and Jarret's lives. 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 what seem at first unconnected chapters, Brooks switches from one man's story to the other. Lexington's life alters the lives of Brooks' two central African American characters, Jarret and Theo, living a century and a half apart. His successive owners' treatment of Lexington parallels their relationship with their enslaved human beings. 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. Seemingly, it refers to Lexington, the horse who holds the narratives together. The choice of the book's title is a curious one.

That leads to Lexington's eventual blindness but also saves him from what would have been his fate. A fluke saves him: For a while, a white trainer's vanity refuses to allow a diligent black groom to care for the horse. On the other, as a commodity, he is destined to be literally run to death. On the one hand, he is cosseted by his owners and valued for his unparalleled speed and will to win. Slavery and its residue - racism - are at the core of the novel.Įven Lexington, thought to be the fastest horse ever, is affected by racism and greed. 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. 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. 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. Her multiple plots and sets of characters collaborate to achieve a single effect - an effect that is itself unsettling. In Horse, author Geraldine Brooks' control of her craft is on full display.

Geraldine brooks novels