An outsider, Scott sees a bit beyond the rigid structures of race in Kentucky and New Orleans, where part of the novel takes place. Scott (who also contributed articles to The Sporting Times), adds dimension to the tale. The story of the artist, Pennsylvania-born Thomas J. Her father is the famed 'emancipator' Cassius Clay still, Mary Barr falls back on platitudes when Jarrett is ripped from the only home he has known.īrooks unspools the mystery of who painted the portrait Theo found, what horse it depicts, and how it landed on a sidewalk junkpile in Washington, D.C. Jarrett struggles to manage Mary Barr's well-meant yet perilous overtures of friendship. Theo is racially profiled right and left, and we learn how racism destroyed his love of polo. Well-intentioned women like Jess and Mary Barr Clay, the granddaughter of Jarrett's former slave owner, often make complicated situations much worse. 'Horse' dramatizes the challenges both Jarrett and Theo face while navigating a white-dominated world. She, like Brooks, is a white woman from Australia. Another chance encounter sparks his affair with Jess, a specialist in vertebrate osteology at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History. His chance discovery of a junked portrait of a horse leads him to undertake a project about enslaved figures depicted in equestrian art. Theo, a Black graduate student in art history, knows horses from his undergraduate days at Oxford where he excelled at polo.

Jarrett’s present-day counterpart lives in Washington, D.C and he too inhabits a world limned by racism. Like a great racehorse, these marvelous chapters seize the bit and take us on a thrilling run. Brooks has done her homework as always, mining diaries like ' The Barber of Natchez,' works of history like Katherine Mooney’s ' Race Horse Men: How Slavery and Freedom Were Made at the Racetrack,' Keeneland Library’s archival holdings, and a wealth of 19th-century sports newspapers.

The courier 2019