It also leads to superstition ('I got my lucky socks on. The material about luck leads to musings about what one can and cannot know about a horse's future performance, and thus to questions about an individual's ability to control circumstances. The material about choice shapes the moral and existential crises of the book, because while they are winning and losing horse races, the characters in this book are also struggling with their professional and personal lives. Smiley pulls it all off by writing flawlessly, and because her book turns on questions about luck and choice. We see Pisser Hwang, a Chinese owner, as he considers his mother's bond with his horse, and so on. Thus, we're witness to jockey Roberto Acevedo's beautiful riff on how 'time passed differently depending on where you were on the track.' We know how a boy named Jesse feels about his father's manic betting and endless homilies about racing. Rather than pick one or two characters to narrate 'Horse Heaven,' Smiley enters the minds of more than 50 characters. Then there are the horses - nervous Froney's Sis, long-suffering Justa Bob, aggressive, unmanageable Epic Steam - whose personalities and foibles Smiley describes with the same detail, humor and evident love as the humans'.

Then there's Alexander Maybrick, a super-rich, somewhat pig gish man, trying to resist his own worst self, and his wife, Rosalind Maybrick, an efficient expert at meeting her own desires.Īnd more: rough-mouthed trainer Deirdre Donohue and her charming Irish cousin, George Sir Michael Ordway, a sneaky British buyer's agent Audrey Schmidt, a girl who loves horses Luciano, a horse masseuse who never met a problem (in a human) that a plate of pasta couldn't cure.

There's Buddy Crawford, an unscrupulous trainer who has found, much to his dismay, Jesus, and Buddy's virtual opposite, Farley Jones, who tries to live by 'The Tibetan Book of Thoroughbred Training,' a sheet of instructions - 'Do not take anything to heart' - that he keeps pinned to his office door. The story concerns the lives of numerous owners, trainers, assistant trainers, farm managers, jockeys, vets, bettors and grooms, all interrelated, at least loosely, by their relationship to a handful of horses whose fortunes the novel tracks.

And this despite the fact that for 561 pages, Smiley, author of 'Moo' and the Pulitzer Prize-winning 'A Thousand Acres,' never strays from her one subject: the world of thoroughbred horse racing.Īnchored by the calendar of the racing circuit, 'Horse Heaven' starts the day after the 1977 Breeder's Cup at Hollywood Park and ends after the same race in 1999. Odds are, even those who've never been to a racetrack and who don't particularly care for horses will nonetheless find Jane Smiley's new novel, 'Horse Heaven,' an absorbing read.

Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley