Horse Heaven--Great New Horse Book from Jane Smiley

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Linda B. Merims lbm@ici.net

Jane Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1991 work
_A Thousand Acres_.  Some of you might have seen the film
version of this book starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica
Lange.

It turns out that Smiley is an avid horse woman.  Her first
novel dealt with horses, the excellent and chilling _Barn Blind_.

Smiley has written a new novel that is currently on the NY
Times best seller list:  _Horse Heaven_.

Smiley seems to write in two voices.  There is the deadly serious
voice she uses in _A Thousand Acres_ and _Barn Blind_, but
she also has an extremely witty, comedic voice that she used
in her last bestseller, _Moo_, and uses again in _Horse Heaven_.

_Horse Heaven_ is about horse racing.  It is one of those "cast
of dozens" books with many characters of many professions (breeding
farm owner, trainer, farm manager, bettor, owner's wife, horse
crazy kid, apprentice jockey &etc.) in many locales (Florida,
New York, Maryland, Los Angeles, the Bay area).  Several of the
prominant characters are horses, although Smiley is careful not
to anthropomorphize or sentimentalize her horses.  My particular
favorite is Justa Bob who is...justa racehorse.

Here is a taste of the book.  Trainer Buddy Crawford
has just conspired with a bloodstock agent and several
cronies to trick his multimillionaire software magnate newbie
owner into paying $3 million dollars for a 2-year old in
training worth only about $500,000 by faking bids at an
auction.  Buddy and his cronies split a million dollars worth
of kickbacks from the bloodstock agent.  The horse was unloaded
by his original owner because he is a hell-raiser who shows every
sign of taking after his crazy sire.)

 "By the time Epic Steam had been in Buddy's barn for only
 three days, whinnying and stampeding around his stall,
 staring at all the filies, and in every way creating a
 ruckus, Buddy was ready to geld the animal.  But you didn't
 go to an owner and tell them that a three-million-dollar
 two-year-old who hadn't run his first race yet and had the
 breeding of a king needed his golden treasures, truly a
 set of family jewels, removed just for the sake of some
 grooms and exercise boys who made three hundred dollars a
 week..."

Now that's telling the truth about horse racing!

Linda B. Merims
lbm@ici.net
Massachusetts, USA