A Year at the Races, the title of this extraordinary book by Jane Smiley, is the peg on which to hang the author’s remarkable insights into the horse and all his workings. It is indeed about racing and her experiences with her various horses at the Californian tracks, but that is almost a sideline. This is about Jane Smiley and horses.
Smiley is already a hugely successful writer, and so her horses’ life must come as her, at best, third preoccupation, after her children and her writing; this she denies, emphasising her obsession with the horse, but surely she cannot be serious?
She has clearly thought about horses not only a great deal and for all of her life but with originality. She mistrusts every hand-me-down factoid about training horses and she never stops asking questions.
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