How can a single object connect people generations apart? Geraldine Brooks tells a detailed story to answer this question in Horse, her popular novel that follows the journey of three paintings of a great racehorse across centuries of history.
The many characters who shepherd these paintings across time and space are connected to Lexington the horse in overlapping ways. Jarrett, an enslaved groom, forges a deep bond with Lexington that transforms him into a record-breaking racehorse and survives through the tumult of the Civil War. Thomas Scott captures Lexington’s essence on three canvases and ensures that the horse’s legacy—and indeed, Jarrett’s legacy—survives all the way to the 1950s and 2000s, where art dealer Martha Jackson frequents one canvas and doctoral student Theo studies another. Jess, an osteologist at the Smithsonian Museum, finds the horse’s preserved skeleton to be profound, and her budding relationship with Theo is fueled by the intellectual interest they both have in this long-dead champion and his groom.
While multiple narrators pull the thread of Lexington’s legacy through history, it is Jarrett, the groom tasked with Lexington’s care and upbringing, who narrates the most chapters and shows that there is an undervalued person behind the horse’s popularity. The torment of Jarrett’s condition — enslaved, separated from his father, subject to the whims of whichever man becomes Lexington’s master — is contrasted with his deep love for the horse. Jarrett is powerless in so many areas of his life, but when it comes to Lexington’s well-being, he is unafraid to share his opinion and put himself in danger. He walks a tightrope between self-preservation and protection of the horse, making him a powerful character with many layers.
While many years pass between Jarrett’s life with Lexington and Theo’s and Jess’s lives as researchers in DC, tension hangs over the present-day narrators like a dense mist—creating the sensation that it’s not just a legacy of greatness has been passed along with the paintings and skeleton of the horse, but a legacy of injustice as well. As a black man, Theo faces obstacles that Jess, who is falling in love with him, cannot possibly conceive of. This throws a wrench in their relationship even as they try to spend more valuable time together. They both study the same great racehorse, but their perspectives on the horse and his backstory are very different.
With a rich narrative arc, Geraldine Brooks reveals how the more shameful aspects of history may worm their way into the present, hidden within seemingly neutral artifacts. Theo, for example, seeks to give a name to the unnamed groom in the painting of Lexington he studies, sensing that the groom’s pivotal role in the racehorse’s success has been washed out of historical narratives.
I would liked to have read more from the perspective of Martha, who links the 1800s and 2000s together; as a contemporary art dealer who finds that her maid, Annie, has come into possession of one of the paintings of Lexington, her experience serves as more of an endpoint for the painting’s journey than an addition to the ongoing narrative. Still, the fact that Martha is intent on helping her maid sell the painting to support her family implies a ‘cosmic correction’ of the morally gray conditions in which the painting was created.
I found this novel to be both touching and haunting. It captures the complexity behind great historical figures and artifacts, reminding us to look deeper than the surface of a work of art or scientific specimen. An equine lover, a student of history, or anyone with an interest in split-time novels would appreciate Horse, but the themes of the novel are timely and relevant for any reader, at any time.