Book Reviews

Horse Heaven: A Novel

Knopf, 576 pp., $26

Jane Smiley's new novel is enormous and overflowing -- a cheerful, generous monster of a book. But like a thoroughbred, all that power and size come in a splendid shape, kept under perfect control.

Smiley, author of A Thousand Acres and Moo, among many others, takes us on a thundering ride through the high-end horse-racing industry, and through the minds and hearts of every creature in it: owners and trainers, breeders and bettors, jockeys and grooms, horses, and one small dog. The novel is Dickensian in its multiplicity, its minor and mischievously named comic characters (rapper Ho Ho Ice Chill anyone?), its length, and its wit. What's more, the sheer amount of information Smiley has on hand about horses and horse racing is astonishing, and in less-skilled hands, might overwhelm. But she has more in mind than horse racing. This sweetly comic novel takes advantage of the chaotic world of the track to convey a warm, mature, spiritual philosophy as well.

Of the dozens of characters woven through this tale of four yearling horses and how they grew, many are concerned with spirituality in one form or another. Take Elizabeth, a large, loud woman in her 60s who practices tantric sex and claims to communicate with animals. She is a marvel of comedy, and might be nothing but a figure of fun, except that she does communicate with animals (and makes a smart bit of money at the track with the useful information gleaned thereby).

Or there's Buddy, a winning trainer who is notorious as a ruthless, horse-abusing cheat. He struggles with the astonishing surprise of having found Jesus, or of Jesus' having found him: "Still, it was a toss-up, when you woke up in the night and told yourself Jesus would like you better with a 4-percent win average, whether that was enough to compensate for how much you wouldn't like yourself."

Even Smiley's characters firmly rooted in the material world are sometimes inexplicably blessed by the supernatural. Rosalind, a wealthy woman who abandons her passionate affair with a trainer to return to her difficult husband, suddenly receives the power to grant others' wishes -- only tiny ones, it's true ("Rosalind glanced at [the flight attendant], then granted her a wish. A moment later, the head of the guy in seat 1C, a guy whom Rosalind had recognized as Pete Rose, dropped forward into a heavy sleep"), but still.

Horse Heaven is a generous cornucopia of a book, and there's quite a bit more to it than racing and God. A lot of sex, for one thing. And winding throughout is the motif of communication and miscommunication -- between humans, between animals, and between humans and animals. Desire and communication, of course, are both closely knitted up with the overriding theme of love.

Indeed, there are so many themes, so many characters, so many plotlines to untangle -- as in racing, as in life -- that you might ask about this book, as a character does about his life: "Was there a thread here ... ? Meanings seemed to press themselves upon him, but what meanings? Wasn't the lesson of racing that there was no meaning, no pattern, nothing except daily chaos to be engaged with?"

The answer, as a trainer who devises the wryly named "Tibetan Book of Thoroughbred Training" discovers, is "to trust life itself" -- even after "thirty years at the racetrack, where shock, surprise and amazement were the daily fare."