A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck
Jane Smiley, 2004
Random House
287 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400033171
Summary
The Pulitzer Prize—winning author of A Thousand Acres gallops into territory she first explored in her acclaimed best-selling novel Horse Heaven (“Deeply satisfying...a smart, warmhearted, winning book” –New York Times Book Review) with this irresistible account of her lifelong love affair with horses.
Smiley draws upon her firsthand knowledge of horses, as well as the wisdom of trainers, vets, jockeys, and even a real-life horse whisperer, to examine the horse on all levels–practical, theoretical, and emotional.
She shares not only “cute stories” about her own horses, but also fascinating and original insights into horse–and human–behavior. To all this she adds an element of drama and suspense as two of her own horses begin their careers at the racetrack. As the sexy black filly Waterwheel and the elegant gray colt Wowie aspire to the winner’s circle, we are enchanted, enthralled–and informed about what it’s really like to own, train, and root for a Thoroughbred.
A Year at the Races is charming, funny, and a bit outrageous: a candid exploration of the abiding bond between humans and horses, told with panache, intelligence, and humor. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 26, 1949
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Rasied—Webster Grove, Missouri
• Education—B.A., Vassar College; M.A., M.F.A, and Ph.D., Iowa University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize, 1992; National Book Critics Circle Award, 1991
• Currently—lives in Northern California
Jane Smiley is the author of numerous works of fiction, including The Age of Grief, The Greenlanders, Ordinary Love & Good Will, A Thousand Acres (for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize), and Moo. She lives in northern California. (From the publisher.)
More
Jane Smiley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist.
Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from John Burroughs School. She obtained a B.A. at Vassar College, then earned an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. While working towards her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar.
Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. Henry Award for her short story "Lily", which was published in the Atlantic Monthly. Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. It was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997. In 1995 she wrote her sole television script produced, for an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), is a non-fiction meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E. M. Forster's seminal Aspects of the Novel, that roams from eleventh century Japan's Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji to twenty-first century Americans chick lit.
From 1981 to 1996, she taught undergrad and graduate creative writing workshops at Iowa State University. She continued teaching at ISU even after moving her primary residence to California.
In 2001, Smiley was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
To an equestrian reader, picking up A Year at the Races is like walking in on the kind of conversation that always starts when people gather around the horses they love. You hear that kind of talk, an easy mix of anecdote and theory, in stables at day's end, and at rodeos and fairs and shows. The conversation may go anywhere, but it's always about one thing: the nature of horses … so the question emerges: what is the nature of horses? In A Year at the Races, Smiley examines love, ambition, personality and intelligence in horses, mixed with enough good horse stories to keep any reader happy.
Verlyn Klinkenborg - The New York Times
Writing with nail-on-the-head precision, Smiley revels in the physical genius of horses, explores their five planes of equine awareness, delves into their sociology and psychology, and does it all with unapologetic obsession.
Sally Jenkins - The Washington Post
In a wide-ranging and detailed, yet somewhat flat memoir, Smiley (A Thousand Acres; Moo; etc.) examines the nuances of horses' lives and of the people who build their lives around them. She does not aim "to evoke horseness, but to evoke horse individuality; to do what a novelist naturally does, which is to limn idiosyncrasy and character, and thereby to shade in some things about identity." This she accomplishes through illustrative episodes with some of the horses she has owned, focusing on two and their fortunes at the track. While the book offers anecdotes and an array of Smiley's theories about horse personality and cognizance, it lacks the narrative or dramatic flair that one expects would come naturally from such an accomplished novelist. The writing can often be formulaic: "In June, Eddie died, and Alexis became my trainer. Hornblower was two. I was fifty. Alexis was forty-eight. Mr. T. had died the year before, at twenty. Jackie was three. Persey was four. Alexis and I began to become friends." Smiley talks of moving her horse from one track to another as "being asked to leave Harvard and take a course at Boston University," and she delights in cutting a grand figure when arriving at the more posh tracks in a publisher-provided Mercedes limousine. In the end, the book provides a meticulous look at the world of thoroughbred horses, but it has too many flaws to be a perfectly enjoyable read.
Publishers Weekly
Novelist Smiley (Good Faith, 2003, etc.) portrays her life with horses in a text full of quirks, neuroses, personal insights, theories, and lots of polished vignettes. "Before I was a mother, before I was a writer, before I knew the facts of life, before I was a schoolgirl, before I learned to read, I wanted a horse," writes Smiley in this rangy memoir, which encompasses a whole lot more than a year at the racetrack. She gets one too, thanks to generous parents, and soon learns that "every horse story is a love story...(or, to be cooler about it, mutual attachment)." She draws upon a huge body of anecdotal material, much of it her own, to get at a horse's individuality, the idiosyncrasies and character traits that shade into something called identity. She explores the kinesthetic, psychological, and spatial intelligence possessed by horses; she comments on Thoroughbred companionability (a concept horsemen tend to scoff at), arguing that the animals seem to take pleasure in wandering or sparring and actually "like to form hierarchies." Smiley is a close observer, and what she notes is always interesting: a particular horse's desire for ritual, the intricate social world at the backside of the track, the expense of horses as compared to kids ("though it costs as much to keep a racehorse at Santa Anita as it does to keep a child at Harvard, the payoff can come within months"). Some of her experiences are truly strange: her relationship with a horse communicator whose talent is not just uncanny, but surreal; episodes with an "energy healer," not quite as otherworldly as those with the communicator but possessing their own mystical singularity. The surety and glow of her prose fragrantly convey the author's sensuous and protective love for horses; she's the kind of mother any foal would be lucky to have.
Kirkus Reviews
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