December 7, 2010
I was expecting a story about horses when I read The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss and indeed, it is a moving exposition on the relationship between people and horses. But The Hearts of Horses is also one of the most beautiful period pieces I've ever read, and in nineteen year-old Martha Lessen, I found one of the most original, inspiring, and endearing heroines I've ever encountered. A Read All Day reader recommended The Hearts of Horses to me. I had never heard of the author Molly Gloss but upon learning that the book was about a female horse breaker in the early twentieth century, I was intrigued. I grew up riding horses at a small stable not far from our house, set on the edge of a sprawling Cook County woodland preserve. When I wasn't riding, I was daydreaming of becoming a Martha Lessen, a girl with an innate and gentle genius with horses, and also a champion for their hearts and a protector of their spirits and bodies.
What young Martha daydreamed of was becoming a cowboy of the legendary Wild West, like the one portrayed in the then popular novels of Zane Gray (Riders of the Purple Sage). In the early 1900s the lore of the West was strong even as the reality of wide-open ranges and horse-dependent ranches was fading away. Fleeing a brutal father and worn-out mother, Martha comes to a small community in Elwha County, Oregon, without any real plan other than spending a few months to break a few horses, then traveling on. But she becomes slowly integrated into the community, and a sympathetic but observant witness to the fears and fevers brought by the United States entry into World War One. Her gentle way with horses, and her ability to understand their individual fears and praise their strengths is a subtle but powerful metaphor for how she absorbs and understands the individual stories of the families she meets in Elwha County, and determines our own empathy for these families coping (or not) with the hardships of living in an isolated ranching community, participating in a national war effort, and suffering through universal issues of illness, deceit, and loss.
Gloss is not only intuitively descriptive of human emotions and equine temperament, but is also a master of both depicting landscapes and understanding our reactions to them ("It was the kind of view that could make your heart turn over"). She is also a lyricist to the last years of the western frontier, a time of homesteaders and ranches, horses and cattle, and of small towns and rugged individuals (male and female). Martha's sense that the forced displacement of the Native Americans from their lands struck at the soul of the West is a foreshadowing of the changes to be wrought on these ranching communities by war, motor cars, and other forms of "progress".
Gloss's novel, with its simplicity, dignity, and beauty, reminds me of the writing of Wendell Berry, particularly as displayed in Hannah Coulter, his novel about a small town during the years of World War Two and on into the mid twentieth century. In fact, the two novels are complementary portrayals of uniquely American communities, and both focus on original, contemplative, and observant women, using their experiences as moving and invigorating and yet quietly realistic testaments to the fortitude and faith of everyday people with everyday lives, the bedrock of the widely varied and uniformly tough American experience. The Hearts of Horses is a must-read.
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