'Horse' rousing ride through American history: Author speaks in Naples on Monday
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Geraldine Brooks’ life took an unexpected turn more than a decade ago when, during a casual lunchtime conversation, she heard about the skeleton of a Civil War-era racehorse that had just been transferred from the Smithsonian Institution to a Kentucky museum.
The result was “Horse,” her fabulously successful, complex historical novel about Lexington, who was the most successful horse in American racing history.
Brooks, a longtime journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction, comes to Naples on Monday, March 25, as the final speaker in the 21st Annual Nick Linn Lecture Series for the Friends of the Library of Collier County.
This year’s Nick Linn Series of luncheons and lectures sold out quickly, a testament to the nonprofit Friends group’s reach as a fundraiser for the Collier County Public Library system’s 10 branches.
Every year, the Friends donates hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Collier library system. Those funds finance, among other things, the acquisition of e-books and support for the Children’s Summer Reading Program, the genealogy research databases and the Mail-a-Book program. (Go to www.collier-friends.org to become a Friends member and learn about next year’s series.)
Brooks won Pulitzer for novel 'March'
Brooks, who grew up in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia, came to the United States to earn a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University. As a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, she covered crises in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. In 1990, she and her husband, fellow WSJ journalist Tony Horwitz, jointly won the Overseas Press Club Award for their coverage of the Gulf War.
After writing nonfiction books, Brooks turned to novels. She won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for “March,” which is her imagining of the life of the absent father Robert March in Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel “Little Women.”
Talking about transitioning from journalism to fiction, Brooks told the online talk show PBS Books that “as a novelist, you pull on the thread of fact until it frays.”
That’s just what she did with “Horse,” her sixth novel, which was recently released in paperback.
Researching Lexington the racehorse, who lived from 1850 to 1875, revealed that the horse was trained, cared for and ridden by highly skilled but enslaved Black men whose names were mostly not recorded. Brooks created the book’s character Jarrett based on accounts of a lost painting showing Lexington “being led by black Jarret, his groom.”
The book’s portrait of life in the slave-holding South has two other parallel plots:
The lost painting of Lexington surfaces in the New York art world in the 1950s, and
In modern-day, we go inside the labs at the Smithsonian where science meets art restoration, and we witness racism today, reflected in the violence of the white supremacist riot in Charlottesville and the murder of George Floyd by a police officer.
The Washington Post’s reviewer called “Horse” a work of “fluid, masterful storytelling.”
Husband, award-winning journalist Tony Horwitz died in 2019
The author’s life took a tragic turn in 2019 when her husband died suddenly while on a book tour. Tony Horwitz had won his own Pulitzer Prize in 1995, for national reporting at the Wall Street Journal, before he turned to writing nonfiction books. The couple married in 1984 and had two sons.
Brooks shares some background on her writing of “Horse,” her relationship with libraries and the subject of her next book.
Naples Daily News: “Horse” is so complex, braiding three time periods. You explore multiple disciplines such as sports, science, and painting and literature. And you address huge social issues such as slavery, interracial relationships and racial profiling. While writing “Horse,” did you ever think you’d bitten off more than you could chew?
'Horse' delves into issues like interracial relationships, racial profiling
Geraldine Brooks: Oh, yes, absolutely. But I didn’t bite it off all at once, so that recognition crept up on me. The scope of the novel revealed once I embarked on the research. I thought I was going to be writing a reasonably simple story — the great tale of a famous racehorse with a dramatic twist during the Civil War. Then I got interested in the science around the horse’s skeleton during its time at the Smithsonian, which led me quite unexpectedly to the art story — the fascinating equine painters of the mid 1900s and the fate of the paintings that they produced. I had no idea that a tale about this racehorse would lead right to Jackson Pollock, but to my astonishment, it did. And then, of course, and perhaps the most challenging, it also led right to the story of race relations in our country. Since the horse’s first trainer, jockey and groom were all Black and either enslaved or formerly enslaved, that was a piece of the history I couldn’t ignore. It was a challenging book to write, I can't deny it. But the journey through all the lives and time periods was also extremely rewarding.
NDN: Your two modern-day characters are both immigrants — but one is a white woman from Australia and the other a Black man with Nigerian heritage, so their experiences in this county are very different. What was your inspiration to place two “outsiders” in the United States of 2019?
GB: I am an outsider myself, and since so many of the characters in this novel required an immense amount of research, I thought I’d give myself one character that I knew quite well, and that’s my Aussie scientist, Jess, who arrives here to study for a while and then finds all kinds of doors opening for her. That’s essentially my story. As for Theo, he was inspired by something my friend Skip Gates says to all his Harvard students: “There are 40 million ways to be Black in America.” I wanted my Black character to be complicated, un-stereotypical, and also a bit of an outsider, because an outsider notices things a native-born person takes for granted, and perhaps also misses things that a native-born individual finds obvious.
NDN: Since you’re speaking in Naples to a group of library supporters, do you have any memorable experiences with libraries that you could share?
'Library everything to me when I was growing up,' Brooks says
GB: The library was everything to me when I was growing up. There wasn’t a lot of surplus cash in my family; we couldn’t afford to buy many books. But we took the bus to the library as a family every Saturday and we came home hauling our own stack of reading to devour during the following week. I remember, as if it were yesterday, the thrill of running my fingers over those plastic-covered spines, feeling the tingle of anticipation: where would that next book take me?
NDN: Are you currently researching or writing your next book, and if so, what is it about?
GB: My next book is a short memoir, “Memorial Days,” about what I learned when my husband, Tony Horwitz, died suddenly in 2019, when he was himself on book tour. It’s with my editor at Viking right now and will be published early next year.
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Brooks final author of 21st Annual Nick Linn Series
What: Author lectures and luncheons that raise funds for the Collier County Public Library system
Where: The Ritz-Carlton Golf Resort, 2600 Tiburon Drive, North Naples
When: Luncheons begin at noon. The author takes the stage at 1 p.m. Book signings begin at 1:50 p.m. after a Q&A session with the audience.
Tickets: Tickets are no longer available for this year’s series. Friends memberships begin at $40/year and also provide access and discounts to other programs. To become a Friends member and get information about next year’s series, contact Marlene Haywood at mhaywood@collier-friends.org or 239-262-8135.
Website: https://collier-friends.org/events/nick-linn-series/
This article originally appeared on Naples Daily News: 'Horse' wild ride through American history: Author to speak in Naples
