Biography
Born September 14, 1955, Geraldine Brooks is a native of Sydney, Australia, who grew up in its inner-west suburb of Ashfield. Her father, Lawrie Brooks, was an American big-band singer stranded in Adelaide when his manager absconded with the band's pay. He decided to remain in Australia, and became a newspaper sub-editor. Her mother Gloria, from Boorowa, was a public relations officer with radio station 2GB in Sydney.
She attended Bethlehem College, a secondary school for girls, and the University of Sydney. Following graduation, she was a rookie reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald and, after winning a Greg Shackleton Memorial Scholarship, moved to the US, completing a master's degree at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1983.
Biography
The following year, in the Southern France artisan village of Tourrettes-sur-Loup, she married American journalist Tony Horwitz and converted to Judaism.
As a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, she covered crises in Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East. The stories from the Persian Gulf that she and her husband reported in 1990 received the Overseas Press Club's Hal Boyle Award for "Best Newspaper or Wire Service Reporting from Abroad."
In 2006, she was awarded a fellowship at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Biography
Brooks' first book (non fiction), Nine Parts of Desire (1994), based on her experiences among Muslim women in the Middle East, was an international bestseller, translated into 17 languages.
Foreign Correspondence (also non fiction) (1997), which won the Nita Kibble Literary Award for women's writing, was a memoir and travel adventure about a childhood enriched by pen pals from around the world, and her adult quest to find them.
Her first novel, Year of Wonders, published in 2001, became an international bestseller. Set in 1666, the story depicts a young woman's battle to save fellow villagers as well as her own soul when the bubonic plague suddenly strikes her small Derbyshire village.
Publications
Her next novel, March (2005), was inspired by her fondness for Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, which her mother had given her. To connect that memorable reading experience to her status in 2002 as an American citizen, she researched the Civil War historical setting of Little Women and created a chronicle of wartime service for the "absent father" of the March girls.
Some aspects of this chronicle were informed by the life and philosophical writings of the Alcott family patriarch, Amos Bronson Alcott, whom she profiled under the title "Orpheus at the Plough,“ in the January 10, 2005 issue of The New Yorker, a month before March was published.
Publications
The parallel novel received a mixed reaction from critics, but was nonetheless selected in December 2005 by the Washington Post as one of the five best fiction works published that year, and in April 2006, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She was eligible for the prize by virtue of her American citizenship, and was the first Australian to win the prize.
In her next novel, People of the Book (2008), Brooks explored a fictionalized history of the Sarajevo Haggadah. This novel was inspired by her reporting (for The New Yorker) of human interest stories emerging in the aftermath of the 1991–95 breakup of Yugoslavia. The novel won both the Australian Book of the Year Award and the Australian Literary Fiction Award in 2008.
Publications
Her 2011 novel Caleb's Crossing is inspired by the life of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, a Wampanoag convert to Christianity who was the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College, in the seventeenth century.
The Secret Chord (2015) is an historical novel based on the life of the biblical King David in the Second Iron Age.
In 2016, Brooks visited Israel, as part of a project by the "Breaking the Silence" organization, to write an article for a book on the Israeli occupation, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War. The book was edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, and published under the title Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation, in June 2017.
Publications
Each year since 1959, Australia’s national broadcaster invites a prominent Australian to reflect on major issues in a series of radio talks. In her series of four lectures, The Idea of Home: Boyer Lectures 2011, published by ABC Books, Geraldine Brooks considers the layered meanings of “home.”
The first lecture, "Our Only Home," is a plea for Australia to exercise its potential as custodian of a huge landmass and a critical share of the world’s oceans to become a leader in the fight to combat climate change.
The final lecture, "A Home in Fiction," unfurls her thinking on the art of the novel.
Publications
She has two sons with her husband Tony Horwitz, Nathaniel and Bizu. Tony died suddenly in 2019 while away on a book tour.
She now lives with a dog named Bear and a mare named Valentine by an old mill pond on Martha’s Vineyard and spends as much time as she can in Australia. In 2016, she was named an Officer in the Order of Australia.
Interview, PBS News Hour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O07y7bkYX2M
Cast of characters—1850s
Dr. Elisha Warfield
Owner of The Meadows, Lexington, KY, where he breeds and races thoroughbred horses.
Retired because of ill health from obstetrics, with its unpredictable hours. He did not regret his retirement. He raised a sixteen-room brick mansion and devoted himself to his many businesses, including the town's dry goods store, and his first love, horses. He’d been a founder of the town’s Jockey Club and overseen the building of its first proper racetrack.
Alice Carneal is his daughter-in-law's name, as well as the horse's.
Cast of characters—1850s
Mary Barr Clay is Elisha's granddaughter; brought up as a young lady but prefers the barn, horses, and Jarret. Convinces him to return when Jarrett attempts escape.
Cassius Clay is her father, an emancipationist who runs a newspaper opposed to slavery.
Cast of characters—1850s
Harry Lewis
Manager/trainer of Dr. Warfield's horse farm, The Meadows. Dr. Warfield always gave him his due and was quick to credit Harry for more than doubling their track winnings. As the doctor grew frailer, he relied on Harry for the management of horses, and had increased his pay to five hundred dollars a year, which was higher than many a White trainer earned.
Harry’s former position, trainer for Mr. Burbridge, had been much more precarious. In ten years’ service, Burbridge never let him forget he was “Burbridge’s Harry.”
Purchased his own freedom, but didn't have enough to purchase his son Jarrett's freedom after his mother died. When Harry’s skill led the Warfield horses to an exceptional season at the track, the doctor relented and bought Jarret from the Todds.
Cast of characters—1850s
Jarrett Lewis, Harry's son
"He shared straw with the two geldings in the carriage house while his mother slept in the mansion, nursemaid to the mistress’s infant. Jarret barely saw her. His first language had been the subtle gestures and sounds of horses. He’d been slow to master human speech, but he could interpret the horses: their moods, their alliances, their simple wants, their many fears."
"He came to believe that horses lived with a world of fear, and when you grasped that, you had a clear idea how to be with them."
"Those two geldings in that carriage house had been more parent to him than his mother in the mansion could have been, or his father."
When he was 5, his mother died and "Fear was something he’d known about that year, vulnerable as a foal without a dam to protect him."
NOTE: keep this in mind when we come to Kristin Hannah's The Magic Hour, and the "wild child."
Cast of characters—1850s
Jarrett Lewis, Harry's son
The name comes from the missing Thomas Scott painting of Lexington being led by “black Jarret, his groom” (mentioned in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1870), but nothing further.
In chapters throughout the book, he is known as Warfield's Jarrett, Ten Broeck's Jarrett, and Alexander's Jarrett.
Cast of characters—1850s
Thomas J. Scott
Painter, of Darley (Lexington) and other Warfield horses, including Alice Carneal. Originally paints Glacier—a 4-year-old white horse
Trained originally to be a doctor/pharmacist, worked in a slaughter house in Philly where he learned horse anatomy. He uses his medical skills during the Civil War
When Lexington races against Sallie Waters, Jarrett gives him the money to buy his freedom to bet on Lexington, and wins.
1st person narrator
Richard Ten Broeck
Horseman who buys Darley, with a syndicate, renames him Lexington, buys Jarrett as well, moves both to New Orleans.
Cast of characters—modern
Jess
She grew up in inner Sydney, Australia, on one of the dense streets of liver-brick bungalows that marched westward with Sydney’s first growth spurt in the 1900s. Even as a child, she was fascinated by the inner architecture of living things and created a natural history museum of skeletons in her bedroom.
Her mother "was the kind of parent who would let her daughter set the house on fire if she thought it could teach something about carbon and oxygen."
Her classmates found her obsession with necrotic matter gross and creepy. She became a solitary teen.
Cast of characters—modern
Jess
She came to the US as an intern at the Smithsonian. "She hadn’t meant to stay in America. But careers can be as accidental as car wrecks." Ultimately, the Smithsonian offered her a permanent position as manager of their vertebrate Osteology Prep Lab at the Museum Support Center in Maryland.
She first meets Tom (Thomasina) Custler about the whale skull in Woods Hole, MA, then with Catherine Morgan, a British vet examining the skeletons of race horses, including Lexington, who is in attic storage at the time.
She dresses practically rather than fashionably and tends to blurt out whatever she's thinking, especially to Theo.
Cast of characters—modern
Theo
Son of diplomats whose father Barry is English and mother Abiona is Nigerian.
Grew up in Canberra, Australia, went to English boarding school, played polo
Now lives in Georgetown, writes for the Smithsonian magazine to supplement his income as a grad student in fine arts
He finds the painting in a pile of discards put out by his neighbor across the street; later he brings her a chicken casserole, and attempts to help her up the steps with her packages.
“He was his own man long before any of his peers even realized that was an option. He’d embraced life as a rootless loner, at home in the world but belonging nowhere in particular. Comfortable with a wide range of people, close to very few.” (p. 186
Cast of characters—modern
"Theo's dissertation was meant to be on depictions of Africans in British art; his working title: Sambo, Othello, and Uncle Tom: Caricature, Exoticization, Subalternization, 1700–1900.
He planned to write of Coon caricatures, Orientalist fantasies, the decorative enslaved servant in ornate livery, proffering fruit or waving peacock-feathered fans for a White master. His thesis argued that these paintings were never meant to be viewed as portraits of individuals, merely status signifiers of the privilege, wealth, and power of the White sitters. The reality of quotidian Black life didn’t merit depiction.
His argument mirrored Frederick Douglass’s caustic essay, arguing that no true portraits of Africans by White artists existed; that White artists couldn’t see past their own ingrained stereotypes of Blackness." (pp. 56-57)
Cast of characters—modern
"Douglass’s piece, published in The Liberator, mocked the caricatures that White painters produced—the broad noses, the thick lips—and asked his readers to consider if they’d ever seen, in life, an actual face that combined all these exaggerated features.
But here was a painting that challenged his thesis. In particular, the man in the top hat—the trainer, Theo supposed—had been depicted possessing a dignified authority. Theo had never seen a painting depicting an enslaved person that emphasized his authority and agency in this way. And yet. That title. Viley’s Harry, Charles and Lew.
Theo felt whipsawed. Troye may have portrayed these men as individuals, but perhaps only in the same clinical way that he exactly documented the splendid musculature of the thoroughbred. It was impossible not to suspect some equivalence between the men and the horse: valued, no doubt, but living by the will of their enslaver, submitting to the whip."
Martha Jackson
Martha Jackson was an American art dealer, gallery owner, and collector. Her New York City based Martha Jackson Gallery, founded in 1953, was groundbreaking in its representation of women and international artists, and in establishing the op art movement.
Jackson attended Smith College from 1925 to 1928 where she studied English. She moved to Baltimore during the war where she studied art history at Johns Hopkins and the Baltimore Museum of Art.
In 1949, following her interest in making art, Jackson moved to New York to attend the Hans Hofmann School of Art. Already an art collector, she took Hoffman's advice to become an art dealer, using sales from her personal collections to fund her gallery.
Martha Jackson
In 1953 Jackson opened the Martha Jackson Gallery in a brownstone on East 66th street in Manhattan. In 1955 the gallery moved to East 69th street, where it remained until Jackson's death in 1969.
Working with the assistance of her son, David Anderson, Jackson's gallery was known as an artist-friendly establishment that represented an international roster of artist from the US, England, Holland, France, Spain, Israel, Japan, and Canada.
The gallery was the first in the US to exhibit Gutai, the Japanese postwar collective, and also one of the first to represent women, including Louise Nevelson and Alma Thomas, who became the first African American woman to mount a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Martha Jackson
Her mother Cyrena was an equestrian, which explains the photos in her bedroom and her interest in horses
Lee Krasner was one of the first friends she made in NYC
Questions for discussion
The structure of this novel is relatively unique; instead of numbers, the chapters are identified by the name of the character featured in that chapter, the location, and the date. Thus, chapters are named Theo, Jess, Thomas J. Scott, etc.
Because the chapters focus on central characters, they also change time periods: current time with Jess and Theo, the pre-Civil War time period of the 1950s for Jarrett, Lexington, and related characters, and the mid 1950s of Martha Jackson. The first two are clearly the dominant time periods.
And, generally speaking, the chapters develop a critical incident in that character's life, something revealing about that character.
This structure, although a little odd perhaps, is absolutely central to the theme of this book.
Why does Brooks structure it this way?
Questions for discussion
Because of this novel's structure, around characters, those characters are important.
Does Brooks have well-defined characters? HINT: some critics think her characters are unevenly developed. One even says some are "flattened."
What do you think?
Which characters are most fully developed?
Questions for discussion
This vacillating structure, between characters and time periods, makes it difficult to give the novel continuity or to hold the narrative together.
How does Geraldine Brooks do it?
Reviewers—The Atlantic
"White Author, Black Paragons: When writing across cultural divides flattens characters, " by Jordan Kisner, July/August 2022. In the print edition, the title is “A White Author Fails Her Black Characters.”
The publishing world has been racked by overdue debate about cultural appropriation and whether and how white authors should write characters from other racial or ethnic backgrounds.
American writer Lionel Shriver gave a notorious keynote speech—at a Brisbane literary festival, ranting about the “clamorous world of identity politics” and the threat she felt it posed to literature: “The kind of fiction we are ‘allowed’ to write is in danger of becoming so hedged, so circumscribed, so tippy-toe, that we’d indeed be better off not writing the anodyne drivel to begin with.”
Reviewers—The Atlantic
Another author states that "imagining ourselves into other lives and other subjectives is an act of ethical urgency. . . . The caveat is to do this work of representation responsibly, and well.”
Note: a book we read last term, The Personal Librarian, about Belle da Costa Greene, librarian for J. P. Morgan, who was black but passed as white, was written by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray.
Reviewers—The Atlantic
But in spirit, the book belongs to Jarret and Theo, with complementary foils in the form of the two young white women. (While there are several Black female characters in the book, none is granted complex interiority.)
Brooks clearly attempts to demonstrate self-awareness, to preemptively deflect any criticism that she has favored the characters whose life experience most resembles her own—but the dynamic she creates between Theo and Jess and between Jarret and Mary flattens all the characters.
Reviewers—The Atlantic
Theo and Jarret are described, at every turn, as exemplary, socially and spiritually. They are handsome, tall, gifted, and educated (Jarret takes an opportunity to learn how to read). Animals instinctively trust them (Theo and his dog are exquisitely attuned).
They are constantly swallowing their rage. They are always patiently explaining something. Where others stumble, they are steady. Theo tells Jess at one point that he wants to help his old-lady neighbor even if she’s racist, because “ ‘whatever she might be, it doesn’t mean that I won’t do what I know to be right.’ Jess sighed, defeated, and smiled at him. ‘You’re just a better person than me, I guess.’
Reviewers—The Atlantic
Conclusion:
I read to the end wanting Horse to right itself, to be one of those books that achieve the creative and ethical intersubjectivity that signals great fiction. Brooks gives Jarret and Theo just enough spark to make us wish she’d also given them a more deeply imagined, nuanced, and substantial portrayal. Each ends as a trope: one a man who triumphs against all odds, the other a martyr. Brooks' sympathies are evidently with them, and so are ours. But sympathy seems like an inadequate achievement in a project like this, which takes as its subject the worst consequences of white Americans’ failure to recognize the full humanity of Black people.
Reviewers—The Atlantic
Conclusion:
Sympathy has a way of falling short, aesthetically as well as politically—it is a frail substitute for the knotty, vital insight that can emerge from sustained immersion in another psyche, another soul. If readers feel sorry for Theo and Jarret without really needing to believe in them as whole beings, what exactly do their portraits accomplish?
Reviewers—The Guardian
Title: "Horse by Geraldine Brooks review – a confident novel of racing and race," June 10, 2022
In a museum laboratory, a young osteologist – a scholar of bones – reassembles the skeleton of a 19th-century racehorse. The animal has spent decades fixed too haughtily upright; a prim parody of a thoroughbred. Rewired, he may run again, if only in the imaginations of those who stare at his bare, beautiful frame.
Note: in the novel, the skeleton is rearticulated, but factually, according to the Smithsonian curator, the original skeleton was well-mounted.
So, is this a theme in the novel?
Reviewers—The Guardian
Jarret’s portion of Horse is exactly the novel you’d expect: bloodlines and broodmares; farriers and knackeries; wild gambles, wild gallops and plantation-era grotesqueries. A dollop of civil war valour. And at the centre of it all, love story: a boy and his horse.
It’s when Brooks resurfaces in the near-present that Horse falters. With his elaborate backstory, convenient thesis and issue-prodding love interest, Theo’s story feels machine-tooled. Raised outside the US, he’s as naive as he is worldly – a man on a collision course with American injustice.
Reviewers—The Guardian
Conclusion:
But with tender precision, Horse shows us history in flux. As Theo researches his abandoned painting, he encounters the devoted boffins who work to enrich the story we tell of the past: archivists, curators, scientists. It’s here that our osteologist makes an appearance, with her lab of flesh-eating beetles and bleached bones. When a skeleton is hung well, she explains, the armature disappears: “A really good mount allow[s] a species to tell its own story.” A really good historical novel does the same thing, letting the past stretch out into a wild and beastly shape. Horse has strong bones – but the struts and wires are showing.
Reviewers—Oprah Daily
"Geraldine Brooks Probes Racing—and Race—in Her New Historical Novel, Horse: The Pulitzer Prize winner explores the unwritten true tale of America’s most famous racehorse—and uses that story to show how far we need to go in confronting systemic racism." by Eleni Gage, Published: Aug 2, 2022
During her research into 19th-century racing, she found, as she writes in her end note, “this thriving industry was built on the labor and skill of Black horsemen, many of whom were, or had been, enslaved…it became clear to me that this novel could not merely be about a racehorse, it would also need to be about race.”
Reviewers—Oprah Daily
Examining a portrait of a thoroughbred named Richard Singleton alongside several Black grooms, titled Richard Singleton with Viley’s Harry, Charles, and Lew, Theo thinks that the artist “may have portrayed these men as individuals, but perhaps only in the same clinical way that he exactly documented the splendid musculature of the thoroughbred. It was impossible not to suspect some equivalence between the men and the horse: valued, no doubt, but living by the will of their enslaver, submitting to the whip.” He goes on to notice that, “while the horse had two names, the men had only one.”
Reviewers—Oprah Daily
Horse unfolds in chapters told from various points of view, and each time the reader is reunited with Jarrett, the chapter bears the name of his enslaver, as the groom might have been described in a painting’s title: Warfield’s Jarrett, Ten Broeck’s Jarrett, Alexander’s Jarrett.
It’s a device that forces the reader to consider a world in which gifted horses are valued more than human beings. And that’s not the only big question Horse asks.
At a research facility studying the declining population of North Atlantic whales, Jess muses on “the artistry and the ingenuity of our own species,” and wonders, “How could we be so creative and destructive at the same time?”
Reviewers—Oprah Daily
Conclusion
. . . it’s the voices of the different characters, each so distinct, that make the novel as delightful to read as it is thought-provoking.
In 2019, Jess thinks, “careers can be as accidental as car wrecks . . . Not many girls from Burwood Road in western Sydney got to go to French Guiana and bounce through the rainforest with scorpion specimens pegged across the jeep like so much drying laundry.”
Reviewers—Oprah Daily
Conclusion
In 1854, Jarrett observes that “to be spoken of as livestock was as bitter as a gallnut.” And that same year, the equine painter, gambler, and sometime reporter Thomas J. Scott muses, “Modest winnings, payments for reportage—as ever, paltry and laggard—would not have kept me long in New Orleans, a city whose ample pleasures are a constant tax upon the purse.”
The care with which Brooks crafts each character’s voice is a plea to look past the categorical labels and legends with which we describe each other, to truly see the individual. Paired with a compelling plot, the evocative voices create a story so powerful, reading it feels like watching a neck-and-neck horse race, galloping to its conclusion—you just can’t look away.
Breakout room question
The ever-popular question about novels, what did you think of the ending?
Jarrett has moved to Canada to run a business, married, and has a child.
Theo is killed.
Jess moves back to Australia to work on a quirky osteological puzzle sponsored by an equally quirky technology magnate.
Putting all this discussion together, what's your final opinion on the book?
Next Week:
Historical background on Hamnet
Week after:
Discussion of Hamnet