Read Full Review >īrooks 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). Brooks folds into a love story the weighty matter of racism and its lethal consequences without stalling the graceful narrative flow. And the novel’s alternating narratives, by suspending time, also intensify suspense. Brooks’s felicitous, economical style and flawless pacing-the way she smoothly accelerates from languor to high adventure-carries us briskly yet unhurriedly along. Yet none of this seems forced or perfunctory. Chapters set in the 19th century are therefore richly populated and dense with talk of emancipation, sedition and corruption. Brooks expertly stages the larger one of the Civil War. Above all, she makes us both impatient to see and fearful to learn what might befall Theo, the black graduate student who rediscovers the painting, and, centuries earlier, Jarret, the enslaved horseman whose story forms the heart of the novel. Brooks’s almost clairvoyant ability to conjure up the textures of the past and of each character’s inner life. This layout may seem a little too neat-and, indeed, the symmetry of the novel’s interlocking plots might well have dulled its emotional effect were it not for Ms. Brooks back to the slave-holding South and onto the battlefields of the Civil War, territories she reimagined in the Pulitzer Prize-winning “March” (2005) and that she conjures up here with equal facility.Ĭopyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. And it was hearing of this episode that led Ms. In 2010 Lexington was loaned to the International Museum of the Horse in Kentucky. When he died in 1875, his preserved skeleton became a celebrated exhibit that later languished in a Smithsonian attic. Brooks writes, “long, low, and level”), Lexington went on to sire legendary champions, among them the very Preakness after whom the race was named. The fastest and most famous American racehorse of his day, perhaps of all time (“He ran as a fox does,” Ms. And its connective tissue is indeed that of a horse, specifically a real stallion named Lexington. “Horse,” by contrast, is a leaner volume: all muscle, no bulk. In her thrilling new novel “Horse,” Geraldine Brooks moves back and forth between the 19th century and the near-present with the same practiced ease she displayed in her 2008 epic “People of the Book.” That saga, you may recall, traversed centuries-from 15th-century Spain to 17th-century Venice and from World War II to the Siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s-accumulating layers of narrative that revolved around an ancient Hebrew manuscript. Photo: National Sporting Library & Museum, Gift of Jacqueline Ohrstrom, from the bequest of George L. ‘Bay Mare and Foal in Stall’ (1833) by Edward Troye.
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