Horse: A Novel — Summary and Analysis
At a Glance
- Genre: Historical fiction; multi-timeline
- Setting: Kentucky and New Orleans (1850s–1870s); Manhattan (1950s); Washington, D.C. (2019)
- Perspective: Multi-perspective narrative spanning horsemen, artists, and scholars
Opening Hook
A foal with meteoric speed. A boy who refuses to let him be forgotten. A painter who captures what history tries to erase. And in the present, two researchers follow a trail of bones and brushstrokes to a truth America still struggles to face. Geraldine Brooks braids these threads into a story of brilliance and brutality, love and loss—then shows how the past keeps galloping into the present.
Plot Overview
Act I: The Antebellum Era (1850s–1870s)
The heart of the novel beats in Kentucky, where an enslaved teenager, Jarret Lewis, recognizes greatness in a skittish colt at The Meadows (see Chapter 1-5 Summary). Jarret’s father, Harry Lewis, a free Black trainer, orchestrates the breeding and is granted the colt’s “racing qualities,” a fragile claim in a society that denies Black ownership. The foal, first called Darley and later renamed Lexington, wins with a ferocity that makes him a legend in the making.
Success brings sale and separation. Lexington and Jarret are sold to Richard Ten Broeck, a calculating New Orleans impresario who sees profit in the horse and utility in the boy who understands him. As Lexington shatters records, an itinerant painter, Thomas J. Scott, documents the horse’s rise and forms an uneasy, genuine friendship with Jarret—one that reveals both solidarity and the blind spots of a white man living off a slave economy.
When Lexington’s eyesight fades, racing ends and stud duty begins at Woodburn Farm. War breaks out. Jarret navigates a landscape of patrols and raiders using horse-sense as survival, until a daring flight carries him to freedom in Canada. Years later, a free and self-made man, he returns to bid farewell to the old champion, paying a debt of love that slavery could not sever.
Interlude: The Art World (1950s)
In Manhattan, trailblazing gallerist Martha Jackson acquires a small oil of a bay horse with four white socks from her young Black housekeeper. The woman's ancestor is Jarret, and the painting—likely one of Scott’s—has been guarded across generations. It becomes a quiet time capsule, proof that art can carry family memory further than ledgers and monuments ever will.
Act III: The Present Day (2019)
In Washington, D.C., two researchers stumble into the same story from opposite ends. Theo, a Nigerian-American PhD student in art history, rescues a grimy horse painting from a neighbor’s trash. Across town, Jess, an osteologist at the Smithsonian, tracks a missing skeleton believed to be a 19th-century racing legend. Their lives entwine as scholarship turns to romance.
Theo’s canvas proves to be Scott’s portrait of young Lexington; Jess’s bones belong to the aged sire. Together, they reconstruct the erased life beside the horse—Jarret’s—through art and science, archive and inference. Then violence pierces the present: while trying to aid an injured white woman in a park, Theo is shot by a police officer who reads his blackness as threat. Jess, shattered, carries home his dog, Clancy, and the story they unearthed—evidence that the country’s oldest injustices still claim lives.
Central Characters
The novel’s power comes from lives that echo across centuries—each illuminating the others. For a complete cast, see the Character Overview.
- Jarret Lewis: Steady, observant, fiercely capable, Jarret is the novel’s moral center. His bond with Lexington gives him purpose and leverage within a system built to strip both away. He endures slavery, seizes freedom, and preserves the horse’s legacy with a tenderness the world refuses him.
- Theo: Cosmopolitan and curious, Theo chases erased Black presences in Western art and wrestles with the daily negotiations of Black life in America. His death is not an accident of plot; it is the book’s indictment.
- Jess: Exacting and empathetic, Jess approaches the past as a puzzle and learns to read its human cost. Through love and loss, she becomes a witness who refuses to look away.
- Thomas J. Scott: A working artist whose canvases double as historical records. He sees Jarret’s talent and dignity yet remains entangled in the patronage of slaveholders—a man both revealing and limited by his time.
- Harry Lewis: A free Black trainer whose expertise shapes Lexington before the world takes credit. His precarious “ownership” of the horse’s qualities exposes the legal fictions that buttressed slavery.
- Martha Jackson: A visionary dealer who recognizes the value of a modest horse portrait—and, inadvertently, safeguards a family archive in paint.
Major Themes
For a broader discussion, see the Theme Overview.
- Race, Slavery, and Systemic Racism: Jarret’s brilliance is constrained by laws that name him property, while violence and sale hover as constant threats. In 2019, the same nation reads Theo’s body as danger, proving that the architecture of racial control has been renovated rather than razed.
- Art, History, and Memory: Scott’s portraits preserve more than a horse—they capture the shadowed figure beside him, insisting on Jarret’s presence. Theo and Jess pair paint with bone to reconstruct truth, showing how artifacts become vessels for stories institutions neglect.
- The Human-Animal Bond: The trust between Jarret and Lexington transcends ownership and transforms both their lives. In the present, Jess’s care for Clancy becomes a tender bridge to Theo, a living thread tying love to grief.
- Hidden Histories and Erased Narratives: By centering Black horsemen, the novel restores the real architects of America’s thoroughbred dynasty. Theo’s scholarship mirrors that mission, pushing Black subjects from the margins of the canvas to the center of the frame.
Literary Significance
Horse is a landmark of contemporary historical fiction for the elegance of its structure and the urgency of its argument. By counterpointing Jarret’s 19th-century life with Theo’s 21st-century death, Brooks makes continuity itself the claim: racial injustice is not a relic but a system that adapts. The book also models multidisciplinary recovery—art history and osteology, letters and ledgers—showing how truth emerges when disciplines collaborate. Most importantly, it reassigns credit, placing Black expertise at the foundation of an American industry and insisting that the nation’s cultural triumphs and brutalities are inseparable.
Historical Context
- Antebellum and Civil War America: The novel charts the plantation South, the economics of the turf, and the violence of guerrilla warfare (including raiders like Quantrill), grounding personal stories in national rupture.
- The Real Lexington: Foaled in 1850 and dead in 1875, Lexington was a record-setter, rival to Lecompte, later blinded, and the era’s preeminent sire—facts the novel threads through Jarret’s arc.
- Contemporary America: Set amid Black Lives Matter and a reckoning with police violence, the 2019 plot aligns fiction with the headlines, making Theo’s killing part of a documented pattern.
Critical Reception
Critics praised the novel’s immersive research, vivid characterization, and seamless weaving of timelines. Reviewers singled out its emotional force and its clear-eyed confrontation with America’s racial history—and present. Some found the modern tragedy predictable or blunt; others argued that the bluntness is the point. Either way, Horse has been widely recognized as major historical fiction and a vital cultural intervention, including winning the 2023 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction.