Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  “Not to mention accidents,” said Al.

  “Do not mention accidents,” said Rosalind. Then the plummy voice on the other end of the line said, “Accident? Has the horse had an accident?”

  “Certainly not, Sir Michael,” said Rosalind. She moved her hand up Al’s arm, lightly, on the inside, non-hairy part.

  Al glanced at her. He was ready for this negotiation to be over.

  Al said, “I hate to take him away from you right now. Your gal out there seems to like him, too.”

  Rosalind said, “They said we could visit him as much as we want. They have a guesthouse.”

  Sir Michael said, “I quote Mr. Nakadate, ‘It would honor us so highly to receive the former owner and trainer of Limitless, that we would certainly be happy to bring them to our small island, at our studfarm’s expense, anytime they might choose to do so. Their friendship is our foremost aim.’ ”

  Rosalind said to Al, “I guess we all have a new place to vacation.”

  Farley said to Al, “I like Japan very much, as a matter of fact. I was there for the Japan Cup once.”

  Rosalind’s fingers arrived at Al’s cheek and forehead, where they traced a little pattern. It made his scalp prickle. He said to Farley, “Looks like a done deal to me.”

  “Me, too,” said Rosalind. She traced the figure again, then ran her index finger down his nose and chin and hairy chest. She was smiling at him.

  “That all?” said Al. “Hey, Farley.”

  “Al.”

  “Thanks,” said Al.

  “Good-bye, Sir Michael,” said Rosalind.

  He pressed “end.” She put the phone on the cradle. Eileen barked one time, practically a command. But it was no good. They weren’t paying a lick of attention to her. Well, that was fine. She jumped off the bed and went out of the bedroom. She surveyed her domain. Free at last. She trotted down the long, familiar hallway into the kitchen, jumped up onto the counter, and trotted over to the sink. There, she noted with deep satisfaction that the plug had been left out of the garbage disposal.

  FROM The Thoroughbred Times:

  Breeders’ Cup Distaff (GI) Winner Residual Out of Danger

  Residual, the flying filly who only two weeks ago won the Breeders’ Cup Distaff, fighting off a late drive by smooth-running mare Beautiful Pleasure, has been declared out of danger by the veterinarians at Rood and Riddle Veterinary Clinic in Lexington, where the filly was airlifted two days after the race. A spokesman for the clinic said that the filly had been in critical condition for almost ten days, but that she was now comfortable, and headed for full recovery. Trainer Buddy Crawford, for whom the Breeders’ Cup win was the culmination of a lifetime in racing, said, “I never thought she wouldn’t recover. It just never crossed my mind. She’s a fighter. Of course, she’s a lover, too. But first and foremost, she’s a fighter.”

  The filly’s owner, Andrea Melanie Kingston, wife of California software magnate Jason Clark Kingston, told the press that the filly would be retired to one of the Kingstons’ newly purchased farms, possibly Alhambra Farm outside of Lexington, and that a breeding was planned to Skip Away in the spring. In ten starts, Residual won six graded stakes, including the Grade One Breeders’ Cup Distaff, the Grade One Bette Midler Handicap, and $2,214,000.

  Of their plans as owners and breeders, Mrs. Kingston said only, “Whatever my husband does, he does in a big way. Wherever he is, he expects to be a presence, and he is. And we just love Buddy.”

  Quote of the Week

  “The party officials couldn’t have been more helpful. I think the outlook is good, myself, and personally, the change of scene will be welcome. Any new project is wonderfully exciting. I can’t tell you how I am looking forward to it.”—Sir Michael Ordway, British horse agent, on the announcement of his appointment by Vietnamese officials as the first racing secretary at the oval being built outside of Hanoi.

  “Certainly,” said Krista into the telephone. She shifted Maia to her other hip and wrote down the number. “I’ll fax you a contract today and we’ll expect the mare at the end of the week. Thank you, very much.” She clicked off the handset and set it down on the desk, then she looked at the note she had made—Storm Cat, out of a stakes-winning mare by Pleasant Colony. The mare herself had won something like three hundred thousand dollars and already produced a stakes winner out of four foals. And they were sending her to Himself, the sire of the legendary Limitless, first American winner of the Arc, ever. And they were paying seventy-five hundred dollars to do so. And they thought they were getting a bargain. And the guy had said, “I saw a mare you bred last year. She came home looking like a million bucks.”

  “Oh, sweetie!” she said to Maia, who laughed in return. Storm Cat! Seventy-five hundred bucks, thirty-eight mares booked for the spring so far. Krista had already ordered a year’s worth of hay, a grass mix, and stored this vast treasure in the hay barn. She carried Maia out of the office and stood there under the eave of the mare barn.

  Across the way, Himself, dirty as a pig already, was rolling joyously in the cool mud, writhing this way and that, flopping onto his right side, then onto his left, hooves waving in the air. He got up, shook himself, snorted, then he leapt and kicked out. After that he galloped across the paddock, bucking and snorting. Yes, Krista noticed, the mares were watching.

  Nothing had happened—no disasters, no destruction, nothing unexpected that couldn’t be fixed. She felt Maia’s hand on her neck and she looked into that darling face. “Down!” said Maia. Krista bent down and stood the little girl on her feet, then she laughed. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  AUDREY SET DOWN her Thoroughbred Times and stood up. Ellen had asked her to clean the office, and that’s what she had meant to do, but there was the magazine, and of course she had to read it cover to cover, all the races, all the veterinary articles, all the letters to the editor and the opinions and the articles about great sires and great mares. Oh, she thought. Oh. What a lucky girl I am. She pushed the sleeping corgis off the couch and straightened the cushions and pillows, then she picked up the paper coffee cups and threw them away. Now the corgis were standing at the closed office door, whining, so she opened it and let them out. There she was, across the aisle, looking at her, her beautiful gray mare from California, Chantilly. Such a neat, trim little mare, so quick and bright. Audrey stood in the doorway, transfixed with love, and the mare gave a deep, affectionate nicker.

  Horse Heaven

  JANE SMILEY

  A Reader’s Guide

  A Conversation with Jane Smiley

  Ron Fletcher teaches English at Boston College High School in Massachusetts. His reviews and interviews have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Phoenix, and The Boston Book Review. He is working on his first novel. Years ago Ron was thrown from a nag.

  Ron Fletcher: Your recent novels seem to fill an ever-broadening canvas, evoking the heyday of the novel with their ambition and scope, myriad characters, and colorful incidents. Have you deliberately widened the focus of your fiction?

  Jane Smiley: Well, it’s not too deliberate. This sort of work was prefigured in The Greenlanders, a novel I wrote in the early eighties; it is longer than Horse Heaven and presents more characters.

  Often the subject determines the shape of the novel. In taking up a generalized sport such as horse racing, I recognized that I’d have to be prepared to move around the world and into and out of the lives of many different types of people. I needed a very broad canvas in order to get even the tiniest flavor of that world down. So, the novel’s breadth was a requirement of the material.

  RF: How did you handle the challenge of organizing and structuring so much material? Did you glimpse a whole from the outset, or did you write your way into the shape of things?

  JS: The whole that I glimpsed from the beginning was much larger than the finished novel. I began earlier in the horses’ lives and covered much more time. I knew, however, from the start that there we
re going to be six horses, and I knew I would follow these six horses as their paths wound around the lives of various human characters. From my point of view, the organizational problem wasn’t tremendously difficult. I just had to keep my eye on the horses and know their whereabouts and company. For the reader who is new to this world, though, the organizational system might seem a little strange. I often say to people, Remember who the horses are and everything will fall into place.

  RF: You introduce Horse Heaven as a “comic epic poem in prose.”

  JS: That’s a quote from Henry Fielding—from Joseph Andrews, I believe. First of all, horse racing started during Fielding’s time. Thus, the novel as a genre shares its beginning with that of horse racing. That seemed to me like a fun coincidence to present. And the idea of a “comic epic poem in prose” captured my intention: I wanted Horse Heaven to have different kinds of stories in it, without being a straight comedy or tragedy. I had envisioned all of these interwoven stories that went in many different directions. The Fielding allusion seemed like a good way to kill two birds with one stone; to suggest the original way that authors looked at the novels they were writing, and to indicate the possibility of many tones and tales in one work.

  RF: Although you present a world with which many are unfamiliar, you seem to respect your reader’s ability to make sense of the novel—double entendre intended.

  JS: That’s true. There’s always the issue of how much to tell. Trying to define every technical term or unfamiliar phrase in the course of the narrative would result in a very humdrum, pedantic work. I figured that for good readers the weight of detail will eventually make its mark and they’ll figure out what they need to know.

  A number of readers have told me that they’ve read the book two or three times. I appreciate that, particularly since Horse Heaven is not a mystery—there’s no big secret or single, explanatory dramatic moment. It tells many different stories. It’s a book that allows one to not keep things exactly straight the first time they read it and, I hope, invites a second or third reading.

  RF: There’s something liberating—and honest—in lifting from the reader the burden of getting everything.

  JS: There are a lot of novels we read and have no idea what the author is talking about, yet, we find them compelling. Most of us read, say, Great Expectations when we’re in the eighth grade. How much of it makes any sense to us? But we keep reading it, and pretty soon we like it.

  There’s no reason for a modern author not to go down that road. A certain number of readers will follow a writer anywhere, because of the concept of the willing suspension of disbelief. If you make the story interesting enough, someone will suspend disbelief no matter how strange or unrecognizable the described places and lives are.

  I had this problem in spades when I wrote The Greenlanders. I was using a strange language to talk about a very strange world. The novel was really, really long and all the people essentially had the same last name. Nonetheless, The Greenlanders has never been out-of-print. There’s always somebody in the audience who says it’s his or her favorite novel. If the story’s there, a reader will follow. Any novel that is set in an arcane world is going to present problems to its author. You can piddle around, trying to solve them in some pedantic way, or you can just have faith in the reader and go for it.

  RF: In many ways Horse Heaven presents a meditation on language: the reach and limits of words; the eloquence of gesture, silence, and other wordless expressions. How did writing the novel change or challenge your regard for the written word?

  JS: I don’t think the written word is limited. The power of figurative language remains unexplored. I don’t belong to the school of writers who say, If only I had another tool. The tool that we have is plenty powerful. I’ve had a lot of experiences in the last three or four years that indicate to me that there are all different kinds of communication between creatures. All of them, nonetheless, can be captured in some kind of language if the writer is precise enough. So far, I don’t believe that any experience lies beyond language. Those who say something is indescribable have chosen not to describe it.

  RF: What is the reader’s role in all of this?

  JS: It’s primary. If the reader feels that the thing described or characterized is satisfyingly expressed, then the author’s opinion about whether she really did convey what was in her mind is of no consequence. When I’m reading To the Lighthouse, which really tries hard to describe stuff that had never been described before, I come away from it with a feeling of revelation. And if I come away from it with that feeling, then Virginia Woolf’s views on whether or not she succeeded are immaterial.

  RF: Like The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, Horse Heaven holds a mirror up to American culture to grapple with the issue of an American identity. The reflection, as in your previous novel, is revealing but not always flattering.

  JS: I have a naturally skeptical view of American culture; sometimes I’m skeptical but happy enough, and other times I’m skeptical and enraged.

  A number of my ancestors have been in America since the early seventeenth century and others since the early eighteenth century. My family history is very much entwined in the ups and downs of American culture. The side of my family that resided in the northern states was made up of strict abolitionists; they certainly engaged in a critique of culture in their day. And though my family is not overtly political, we’ve always discussed what it means to be a mainstream American. We’re not the elite, George Bush type; we’re the Bill Clinton type. (Half my family would die in their tracks if they heard me say that.) My experience has taught me that people who feel at home in a certain culture are always quarreling with it. We’ve always had plenty to say about how it ought to be but isn’t, and that tradition does surface in my novels.

  RF: The racetrack in Horse Heaven functions as a microcosm of democracy and capitalism, and we have there the inevitable conflict between the haves and the have-nots, the privileged and the aspiring.

  JS: The track is probably the most concentrated and diverse capitalist space in any city. There, people from all sorts of ethnic, socioeconomic, educational, and cultural backgrounds are thrown together. And despite all that diversity, everybody thinks about the same two things: money and horses.

  There’s a constant shifting of balance between an interest in money and an interest in horses. Like every continuum, there’s the pure horse person at one end—one who doesn’t care if he’s eating beans cooked on a hotplate as long as he’s next to his horse. And there’s the pure money person who has never looked at an actual horse race, who has only looked at the racing form and the simulcast, despite the fact that the horses are right outside the door.

  RF: What did this breakdown offer you as a novelist?

  JS: Two things: pure cynicism and pure mystery. You have pure calculation on one hand, with the constant figuring of odds, and pure mystery on the other, with the indeterminate role of chance. Both come together—boom—in a big collision, a collision that is pretty much unmediated by anything else, an individualized collision.

  At the track, there’s no sense of being on a team, there’s no sense of having your allegiance to a group. You’re a pure individual surrounded by pure individuals responding to a horse who is a pure individual. That’s another sense in which the track is the ultimate capitalist space. It’s where individualism is the only form of human expression; there’s no collective form of human expression at the racetrack.

  RF: There also seems to be an undercurrent of existentialism or, some might say, spiritual groping: that which exists in the wake of a futile attempt to quantify or explain mystery. We also have the enduring struggle between fate and fortuity.

  JS: At the racetrack you’re always in the presence of the ineffable, which some people prefer to call luck. The expression used in racing for a horse that nobody thought could win but comes from far behind to do so is “He came from the clouds.” And what else comes from the clouds? Revelation. Gra
ce. There’s always this sense of the ineffable at the racetrack, a feeling that can reveal itself as mystery or as something more sinister and dangerous.

  As soon as individuals are gathered in one place and act as individuals rather than a group, the layers of unknowability begin to proliferate. All the factors that you might want to take into consideration cannot be taken into consideration. Finally, you take a leap of faith and land in the presence of the ineffable. People respond differently to this experience; some try to systematize it, others try to ritualize it, and a few just enjoy it, seeing it as a form of mystery that cannot be plumbed, only received.

  RF: It sounds like you belong to the last group.

  JS: Spending time with horses teaches you to experience the moment fully. Every moment you have with a horse is intense yet fleeting. Horses are inherently changeable. As a prey animal, a horse’s instincts—in the name of self-preservation—always say “flight.” He’s acutely aware of his environment, easily scared, and easily distracted. If you want a horse to do a particular thing, you have to habituate the horse moment by moment. This patient, deliberate approach is required for getting the horse to do something as simple as walking a straight line, which doesn’t come naturally to him. So every moment with every horse is full but fleeting. People who love horses have some kind of relationship to the fleeting quality of life. Either they love horses in spite of it or they love horses and appreciate that.

  RF: With Horse Heaven you had an opportunity to marry your two chief passions, writing and horses. What happens now?