Horse

The Horse Whose Image Survived

Lexington was, by any measure, the most celebrated American racehorse of the nineteenth century. He set speed records that stood for decades. His image — painted by Edward Troye, the most important equestrian artist of the antebellum South — was reproduced widely, given as gifts, displayed in parlours and offices across the country. When he died, his skeleton was preserved and is now housed in the Smithsonian Institution.

What survived alongside Lexington’s image and skeleton was extensive. What did not survive, because it was never fully recorded, were the names and stories of the enslaved men who cared for him, trained him, rode him, and whose labor — physical, technical, and intimate — made his racing career possible. Geraldine Brooks’s novel Horse begins with this erasure and asks what it means, and what it cost.

The Structure

Horse moves between three timelines: antebellum Kentucky and Kentucky during the Civil War, following Jarrett, the enslaved young man who is closest to Lexington and whose care for the horse is the novel’s emotional core; present-day Washington, where Theo, a Black art history doctoral student, finds a painting in a pile of garbage that turns out to be one of Troye’s Lexington studies; and present-day New York, where Jess, an Australian bone scientist, is examining the physical remains of racehorses at the Smithsonian and encounters Lexington’s skeleton.

The three timelines are not merely thematic variations; they are different investigations of the same underlying question: what gets preserved, and what gets lost, and what does the pattern of preservation and loss reveal about the values of the society that did the selecting? Brooks manages the transitions between timelines with considerable skill — the historical sections have the more vivid texture, but the contemporary sections have their own urgency.

Jarrett

The historical material is Horse’s most powerful element, and at its centre is Jarrett — a character whom Brooks based on the limited documentary traces of the real person. Jarrett’s relationship with Lexington is the kind of intimate, technically demanding, emotionally complex relationship between human and animal that the historical record tends to preserve on the animal’s side and delete on the human’s.

Brooks renders this relationship with care. Jarrett is not sentimentalised — he is a person of practical intelligence in an impossible situation, navigating the specific constraints of slavery in a world that values him for his skill while systematically denying his humanity. His relationship with Lexington is both genuine — he does love the horse, in the specific way that people who work closely with animals develop attachments — and a measure of the distortion that slavery produces, in which a man’s deepest human competencies are exercised in service of an economic system that does not recognise him as fully human.

The Art Dimension

The novel’s engagement with equestrian art — specifically with the paintings of Edward Troye — adds a dimension that enriches both the historical and contemporary storylines. Troye was a skilled painter whose work was entirely in service of horse owners: he painted animals that could be sold, and the patrons who owned those animals, and the commercial purpose of the work shaped its aesthetic choices in specific ways.

What Troye’s paintings do not typically show is the people who managed and trained the horses. The paintings are celebrations of ownership — of the horse as property, as investment, as source of pride — and the labor that made the horse valuable is literally painted out of the frame. Theo’s investigation of the painting he finds traces this omission and its implications: what does it mean to look at an image of a famous horse and not see the people whose work made that horse famous?

Race in the Present

The contemporary storylines allow Brooks to connect the historical material to present-day racial dynamics in American academic and cultural institutions. Theo, the Black art historian, navigates a world in which his field has largely been the domain of white scholars and in which his own research into the racial history of American horse racing encounters the specific resistances of institutional inertia.

This material is handled with more care than the straightforward historical narrative — the contemporary racial dynamics are more contested, more ambiguous, less amenable to the moral clarity available in the antebellum context. Brooks is alert to this and adjusts her tone accordingly: the present-day sections are more exploratory and less declarative than the historical ones.

Brooks’s Achievement

Horse is Geraldine Brooks’s most ambitious novel: more structurally complex than March, more explicitly engaged with race than People of the Book, more sustained in its investigation of what American history has chosen to remember and forget. It is not flawless — the contemporary sections are occasionally less vivid than the historical ones — but its ambitions are substantial and largely realised.

The novel’s core achievement is making the connection between historical erasure and present-day racial inequity visible through a story that is also, genuinely, a story about a horse and the people who loved him.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — Brooks’s most ambitious novel, and one of the most sophisticated recent examinations of race and American history.