Calling Mr. Ed

There are people (I am emphatically not among them) who don’t like horses. They don’t believe, for example, that a daily flat gallop down a soft road lined with olive trees can cure everything from heartache to headache. They have never felt the softest substance on earth--a horse’s upper lip--nuzzle between their cheek and collarbone. They might not love this book quite as much as I do, but to not like it at all they’d have to be anti-dog, anti-human, anti-love, anti-compassion, anti-courage and entirely anti-insight.

In “Horse Heaven,” Smiley offers us the world of horse racing in mosaic. There is Farley Jones, the Zen-influenced trainer who uses something called the “Tibetan Book of Thoroughbred Training,” and Buddy Crawford, his partly born-again evil twin. There is the near-magic of young jockey Roberto Acevedo, the wisdom of horse masseuse Luciano and the singular beauty of a young black woman named Tiffany who falls in love with the language of horsemanship; “pastern,” “withers” and “fetlock” whisper like love words in her ear. There are the owners, every configuration of rich, from software magnates to rap singers to their Jack Russell terrier-toting wives. There’s Al Maybrick, an industrial entrepreneur who believes horses to be the best sports investment because of their inability to read the sports page.

There is the tiny Joy Gorham, who works with the brood mares; Irish Deirdre Donohue, who trains 2-year-old colts and fillies; and Krista Magnelli, who inherited a stallion she calls Himself--all three of whom prefer the company of horses to the company of men.

There are the children of horse racing: young Audrey, who feels her dead father’s presence whenever she’s near horses, and Jesse, whose gambling-addicted father has him so well versed in the language of bookies that he thinks of himself as an allowance horse. (“Now son,” he says to Jesse, “there was once this guy named Henry David Thoreau. He lived near Boston, but they didn’t have Suffolk Downs then, so he wasn’t a racing man, but he had some good things to say anyway. . . .”)

“Horse Heaven” is a narrative balancing act so ambitious and so precisely executed that it becomes necessary to see Smiley half acrobat, half writer; the novel is as least as athletic as the animals it describes. It also demands an athletic reader--at least 20 major story lines interweave and diverge, overlapping contextually and metaphorically just enough to cohere. Somehow all the novel’s far-flung subplots hang together, and it moves inexorably forward, driven, a horse trainer might say, by nothing but heart.

The feat of this novel is that it keeps its balance, but its joy is the horses. There’s the motherless Froney’s Sis, who can’t get over her painful fillyhood enough to be a success on the track. There’s Mr. T., who can channel love to anyone open enough to receive it; and the irresistible and peripatetic Justa Bob, who finds himself with seven owners in the novel’s three-year span, bringing his horsy goodwill everywhere he goes.

Described with unflinching sensitivity, and given chapters dedicated to their points of view (even the Jack Russell terrier, Eileen, gets a say), the horses steal the show from their handlers. Though the human beings in the novel are highly sympathetic, the horses move beyond sympathy to an even higher state of grace: Their compassion for the human beings is limitless; their love more unconditional than we can know.

“Horse Heaven” also reads like an act of love--the pure, unadulterated kind that often exists between a woman and her horse. It would be easy to talk about it, therefore, as one more literary attempt to unlock that mysterious and age-old connection, to quote a passage like Deirdre’s description of why she worked with horses so long:

“You got up, threw on some clothes, ran out to the barn, and whatever you were feeling, sleepy, anxious about money, achy, fearful, hard, they plucked you right out of that with their pricked ears and big eyes and open nostrils.”

Or Joy Gorham’s moment of horse-induced happiness: “Yes, she thought, she could hold all these things in her mind at the same time--the ground undulating toward her, the horse’s love surrounding her like a beautiful glass globe, her own sight of Mr. T.’s graceful lines and intelligent face at just that moment when he would notice and turn toward her, and if she held these things suspended together in her mind, they worked as a spell against drudgery and loneliness, glare and fatigue, envy, even. . . .”

Or even Tiffany’s declaration of wonder about the place in which an inner-city black girl can suddenly find herself: “How strange it was that you said yes and why not and I’ll try that, and you got someplace where there were horses behind you and horses in front of you and horses all around you.”

But Smiley doesn’t limit herself to one mystery; she engages them all, the ones between men and horses, between men and women, between dogs and horses, between horses and horses and even between horses and other horses.

“Mr. T., a horse of excellent manners and great reserve, didn’t press his attentions upon Farley. Feats of memory didn’t surprise or impress him anyway, nor did coincidences. He was a horse. . . . His whole life was a demonstration that anything at all could happen at any time. You could go anywhere, do anything, have anything be asked of you, from running and jumping in paradise at one end to starving in Texas at the other. . . .”

With so many subplots suspended like juggling balls in midair, the novel feels not unpleasantly like one of those carnival rides based on centrifugal force, which goes around and around until the floor drops out and still all the riders stick to the walls. The unspoken truth in this novel is that whatever peace the humans discover, they discover because of their proximity to a horse. For all the heartbreak horses can bring, all the unaffordable vet bills and the dashed Derby hopes, they also make the happy endings possible. They can help a suicidal woman find her way out from behind the darkness of a heavy hotel shower curtain. They can make a rich man feel gratitude. They can keep an old man alive when he’s in cardiac arrest. They can make a 65-year-old Republican ranch owner send $50,000 to Barbara Boxer. They can make you believe in miracles, just walking down the road behind them, watching them pick up one hoof and then putting down the next.