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| Count Fleet |
My grandfather kept a portrait of the great Count Fleet in his house in Clay, Kentucky. Other family portraits had their space, too, but I remember that horse better than I remember my ancestors. My grandfather and grandmother took me to the races every Friday afternoon in August at the track in Henderson, Kentucky, Ellis Park, or as they called it, Dandy Dade, which had been its name before James C. Ellis bought it in 1925. Yeah, we're going back a ways.
Since the late 1950s, I have followed the Kentucky Derby, some years with more interest than others. The first Derby winner I can remember was Tim Tam, who would have won the Triple Crown in 1958 if he hadn't fractured a sesamoid bone during the Belmont. He still finished second. Just as my interest started to wane, after I'd moved from Kentucky and gone to college, Secretariat scooped me back into the fold in 1973. And tomorrow, the first Saturday in May, I'll be watching when this year's top 3-year-olds, minus several of the early favorites already brought down by injury or gastro-intenstinal distress (Uncle Mo), test the Churchill Downs oval and that long home stretch.
All of this is just to say that horse racing is somewhat more important to me than to most people these days, though not so central as it once was to the culture at large, when the Man o' Wars, War Admirals, Sea Biscuits and Citations drew vast crowds and radio audiences.
In honor of this year's Derby and good old Dandy Dade, I decided to read Willy Vlautin's novel Lean on Pete, which starts at Portland Meadows race track before setting off on a little odyssey across the American West.
My original intention was to compare it to another recent horse racing novel, Jaimy Gordon's Lord of Misrule, which won the National Book Award. Gordon's novel is set at a small track in West Virginia, but it swings into mythic territory pretty quickly. Gordon knows her racetrack, and the descriptive passages in Lord of Misrule sound absolutely authentic to me -- and if you're new to the horse racing game, it even serves as a good primer to how the business end of it works. But magic is afoot in Lord of Misrule, poetry even, multiple voices and points of view, characters cracking and re-assembling themselves, and the horses take on the characteristics of "winged steeds," creatures that are only partly biological.
Vlautin's novel is another sort altogether, told from a single viewpoint, that of its 15-year-old protagonist Charley Thompson, and resolutely naturalistic. Magical and Romantic? Not a bit, unless you consider the attraction of a broken down racehorse to a lost teenager either one (or both). And maybe it is, and maybe that's the point?
