Readers Up #23: Racing Manhattan

Gossip Girl

                April 15, 2020

            Readers Up #23: Racing Manhattan

            Growing up in a place that wasn't New York City pre-Lin Manuel Miranda, I absorbed the Hollywood notion that NYC is the center of the universe. Of course, Hollywood is in California, which I understood to be a wilder, edgier version of my Florida beach milieu--but for art, for music, for culture and debate and ineffable cool, the only place was New York. Media!New York is strangely shaped; geography lessons gleaned from Gossip Girl gave me to understand that getting from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side in less than half an hour is doable (it probably is, if you're rich), while listening to Soviet, Beastie Boys, and Biohazard concurrently allowed the boroughs to retain their grit. Columbia and NYU seemed far more appealing than Harvard or Yale, suitable for students who were not only brainiacs but also wanted to use their powers for good. The New York Public Library was so famous that when you said its name, no one thought you meant the system as a whole. New York's wealth of horse racing history and culture never came up.

Living in a place that isn't New York City now, I am slowly cultivating upstate resentment for the city's gravitational pull. Nevertheless, my love for metro racing is such that when I encountered Terence Blacker's 2016 novel Racing Manhattan, I assumed it was about a New York-bred, set at a New York track, focused on all things blue and rough-edged, or green and genteel, or red-striped and eternally summer. Spoilers: it's... about British racing and set largely in Newmarket. Turns out that the Big Apple may not be the center of the universe? Huge if true. Blacker's most recent young adult foray arrives in a comfortable form: the girl and her horse, doomed to be misunderstood, mocked, and cast aside--unless they can prove their worth against the highest stakes. Ambitious amateur jockey Jay Barton (a last name steeped in horse and rider history) will feel familiar for lovers of horsey tomboy heroines across equine literature, while Manhattan herself is a filly fit for anyone who appreciates Lady Eli and other notorious distaff legends. The trio of conniving uncle, warm maternal cheerleader, and scrappy orphan, plus the perennially popular tropes of rags-to-riches and girl-and-horse, fit Racing Manhattan into the larger body of British children's literature. There's not much to surprise in terms of plot or character, but sometimes (as in, say, times of global crisis) that's just the ticket.

I spend more time with Manhattan. Like me, she has also been written off by the trainer. We are both also-rans, outsiders.

For readers of a particular mind, the devils of racing lie in Blacker's details, his natural use of lingo and mastery of an oddball sport's nuances. The author's website notes that as a boy he dreamed of becoming a jockey, and while his ambitions didn't quite materialize, he eventually made his way to the gallops for this book. Much will be welcome and eye-catching for American readers, despite the English setting and some notable differences between UK and US racing terminology and norms. As an enthusiast whose eye is often on the wrong athlete, I found Blacker's balance of attention to jockey and horse unbeatable; the minutiae of stable "lads" (a gender-neutral term), the politicking necessary for jockeys to obtain and retain rides, and the physicality of the race are vivid and present, set alongside worshipful descriptions of Manhattan's dapples, the articulations of her canter, and the occasionally ugly scents and sights of the stable yard. From Coddington Hall to Wilkinson Yard, from illegal pony races to legendary Newmarket, from biting her tongue in the face of her abusive uncle to rubbing elbows with Saudi princes, Jay's fast-track rise is both the stuff of pipe dreams and very real, as anyone familiar with some of horse racing's personal myths can attest. The book's twists appear ever faster and closer together--picture the Charlestown bullring, maybe--until, thanks to fairy tale logic, Jay and Manhattan live happily ever after.

"Just one question," says the prince. "How would the three of you like to go to America?"

Despite its 2016 publication date and contemporary details like texting and online fandom, Racing Manhattan feels like a book out of time... in more ways than one. There will always be something timeless about racetrack stories, particularly for American readers who may only be familiar with the sport in historic context. Elaborate Derby Day finery, indefensible lawn jockeys, and baroque racehorse names seem to belong to an earlier era. The sexism, sketchy child labor practices, and abuse of Jay's stable yard experiences are relics of the ugly side of tradition, and still found in yards and backsides today. My position from the gate has been that it's always better to have a beloved thing appear commonplace than to situate it at extreme poles of outlandish success (the Kentucky Derby) and abject pain (Santa Anita as the standard-bearer of horse breakdown). In other words, it's been a long time since racing was normal to the average American reader. It seems to scan differently in other countries, with a bit of evidence in British books like Racing Manhattan and Aussie books like Renee Dahlia's Merindah Park series, contemporary stories for two audiences not typically associated with racing (teens and romance fans) published within the last five years. From a US perspective, I don't feel that my sense of near doom is outre, if you measure the sport's lifeblood by its presence in mainstream, normative media. While talented indie authors like Natalie Keller Reinert and Dawn LeFevre stay the course, Big Five publishing overall beats a continual retreat from racing as a worthy topic. It shrinks in the public eye and in the media mirror, until all that is reflected is parody.

If racing disappeared from American sports entirely, would we still feel compelled to write about it? Picture Thoroughbreds on the track as figures populating only period pieces. It's a strange feeling, the suspicion that anything I write this month is already dated--that it depicts a life and livelihood relegated to history, a passe pastime and hollow belief system, a sport with nothing to say about the current human moment. Although a few tracks are still running, I miss the seasons in racing, the calendar year shaped by my access to Belmont, Aqueduct, and Saratoga. In this mood, Racing Manhattan becomes more than the sum of its parts. The girl and her horse are anyone who has loved a horse, up close or from afar. The twin worlds of Newmarket and Santa Anita are available to readers longing for their own home tracks. We can believe that the horses will be waiting for us on the other side of pandemic, of internal abuses, of cultural apathy, of imaginative neglect.

At home or possibly the grocery store, and where do I get a mask printed like Wesley Ward's silks?

Diana

PS: No, Terence Blacker does not appear to be related to Christina or Dan Blacker.

PPS: the buy link to this newsletter's book does not generate any revenue for me, just for the author and an indie bookstore of your choosing! Check out IndieBound, Libro.FM, and BookShop to support small bookstores during the pandemic. Racing Manhattan and many other great horse stories are also available from your local library, which likely has expanded access to OverDrive and hoopla; for New York State readers, even more books are available through NYPL's SimplyE. Happy reading!

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