Horse

Horse, a historical novel by Geraldine Brooks, was published in 2022 by Viking, and is her ninth book. Her body of work includes six novels and three nonfiction titles. Her novel March, about the life of Louisa May Alcott, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2006. Her novels are set in diverse historical periods: Year of Wonders, a New York Times and Washington Post notable book, is set during the bubonic plague in 17th century England, while The Secret Chord is a narrative of the life of the biblical King David, and People of the Book is the story of a conservator tracing the history of the Haggadah across 500 years.

This guide follows the 2022 first edition hardcover copy of the novel.

Content Warning: Horse contains depictions of enslavement and racism toward Black people, both historically and in the present, including racially-motivated violence and the use of racial slurs. It also depicts animal neglect and abuse. The chapters about the enslaved character Jarret adhere to the historical custom of placing the enslaver’s last name before the enslaved person’s first name, i.e. “Warfield’s Jarret.”

Plot Summary

Horse is structured to encompass three separate storylines, set in the 1850s, 1950s, and 2019. Jarret’s story spans 25 years, Martha Jackson’s story encompasses two years, and Theo and Jess’s story takes place over the course of a single year. Jess and Theo gradually uncover fragmented elements of Lexington’s story, collecting them together in hopes of gaining a greater understanding of his history. For the reader, Jarret and Lexington’s story unfolds chronologically and in extensive detail, thus the reader is privy to information these modern researchers never uncover long before it even occurs to them to consider looking.

In 2019, Georgetown Art History graduate student Theo Northam discovers a portrait of a horse in a “FREE” pile outside his neighbor’s house. Simultaneously, Smithsonian Institute osteologist Jess encounters the skeleton of a famous Thoroughbred racehorse tucked away inside one of the museum’s attics. As they pursue their respective investigative work, their research paths collide and they develop a friendship that blossoms into a romance.

In 1850, Jarret Lewis, an enslaved Black teenager, attends the birth of the foal who will one day become known as Lexington, the most famous racehorse in American turf racing history. The chapters devoted to Jarret catalog his travels across the American South with Lexington as they both are sold, first to an unscrupulous racing promoter named Richard Ten Broeck, and then to a devoted breeder of Thoroughbreds named Robert Alexander. Along the way, they regularly encounter Thomas J. Scott, an equine portrait artist. Scott’s chapters, which are written as diary entries, provide insight into Jarret and Lexington’s remarkable relationship.

In 1954, art gallerist and former horse enthusiast Martha Jackson is astonished to discover that the painting her housekeeper Annie has asked her to help appraise is of none other than the legendary racehorse Lexington, who was great grandsire to her mother’s own horse, Royal Eclipse.

Each of these three storylines progresses in tandem throughout the narrative. Jess and Theo discover that the skeleton in the Smithsonian’s attic belongs to Lexington, the same horse depicted in the painting Theo rescued from his neighbor. As Jarret and Lexington’s story unfolds, Theo and Jess discover more about the role of Black men in 19th-century Southern racing culture, as well as the particulars contributing to Lexington’s eventual blindness. Details they will never learn become apparent in the chapters following Jarret and Lexington. The surviving Thomas J. Scott paintings of Lexington serve as a road map, and the final, “missing” portrait is revealed in the end of the novel to have been purchased by Jarret, who acquired it in 1875 after Lexington’s death.

With the help of the insights provided by laboratory research and the extant images they collect, Jess is able to rearticulate Lexington’s skeleton, and it is placed on display at the American Museum of the Horse. When Theo realizes that the painting he rescued from his neighbor’s junk pile is worth $15,000, he intends to return it to her with a buyer’s contact information. Before he can do so, Theo is killed by a police officer who presumes that he was attacking an injured woman he had been trying to help. Jess returns the painting. She later learns that the neighbor sold it to the Lexington exhibit, on the condition that Theo’s name be placed on its plaque, given in his memory. The novel ends as Jess boards a plane back to her home country of Australia with Theo’s dog Clancy in tow, and with the image of a dream in which Lexington runs across the Australian desert with his earliest known equine ancestors at his side.