Readers Up #34: Perestroika in Paris

American adult readers sometimes seem wary of animal stories, as two questions near the top of the Goodreads page for Perestroika in Paris attest: What age group is this book aimed at? Is this a book for adults... or children? A menacing ellipse to boot, and why not--animal stories elude immediate classification and resist pat categories; often pair the fantastic and mundane in ways that require reading past the cover; and always insist on being met on their turf, not the reader's. 

The mere hint that a book cover stylized for adult allure might actually be For Children is enough to drive some grown-up readers away (trust me; I work in libraries. Adult readers, too, seem convinced that librarians are both confessors and knuckle-cracking rule enforcers. I know this is such trash but I love it, one granny admits of her romance haul, while a parent swats a popular graphic novel out of their kid's hands and looks to me for agreement that Hope Larsen doesn't write real books. Stop all of this. Stop!). The question becomes, What is lost when I, an adult, read a book For Children? Nothing, if the book is enjoyed. What is gained when children read books For Adults? Much, provided they have a trustworthy someone around of whom to ask questions. Categorically Perestroika in Paris is For Adults, as other recent animal-character books like Kira Jane Buxton's Hollow Kingdom were. Its overall emphasis on things other than plot movement might be classified as advanced reading... but Jane Smiley's 15th novel draws strength from the straightforwardly confident dream logic of children's literature. 

What is truly at stake for readers who ask this question? Adherence to an increasingly false binary of art and life, reinforcement of their self-image as serious readers, or something more charitable? Smiley is uninterested in reassuring the audience of anything beyond the continual miracle of everyday life. Like The Borrowers and Watership Down, The Secret of NIMH and Catwings, Perestroika in Paris is concerned with worlds parallel to the human, intersecting with the human, overlaid onto and beneath and beyond the human. In this way, although the racecourse and personnel of Longchamp are negligible features, the novel is truly a racetrack book.

What is American racing but our country's parallel life, its microcosm or photographic negative, the occasional canary in the coal mine or witch's poppet? It has been the proving ground of race relations, animal rights, de-regulation. Rituals, clothing, jargon, internal norms, codified myths: the private world of racing is a circuit enclosed within the larger world, as Paras-the-horse moves through her narrow and yet expansive slice of Paris-the-capital.
 

The eponymous racehorse, called Paras by those who know her, is rightfully the story's protagonist. However, it's Frida the dog who experiences the most change, whose life and beliefs and habits and longings frame the novel's gentle, almost imperceptible arc. As a classy Thoroughbred filly, Paras floats above all calamity; shelter, food, and friends appear to her as though by birthright. Frida is streetwise, having lost her busker of a human Jacques and conducting her own business ever since. She knows about money, so when Paras appears toting a purse full of, well, purse money, Frida takes over the responsibility of grocery shopping for her new friend and herself. In some ways, each of the animals Paras encounters replaces her human trainer and groom Delphine and Rania, laboring just a few leagues away at Maisons-Laffitte and pondering their lost filly. Raoul the raven is learned, Kurt the rat is callow yet wise, and Frida is watchful, canny, experienced, holding inside her hound chest a bruised but yearning heart--all sound friends for a classic Fool. Humans drift into and out of Paras's new life, shopkeepers and groundskeepers charmed and baffled by evidence of a horse where never there was a horse before, their offerings and interactions managed to some degree by Frida (who among us has not been managed by a dog?). When a boy appears on the scene, the reader knows that Etienne will make or break things for Frida. As someone with mammoth trust issues, I relate! 
 

Much is made of horse girls, a bit less of horse boys--although there's a book entitled The Horse and His Boy, so clearly they must exist. Etienne is a horse boy of the purest degree, the most recent in Agba and Alec's lineage, entranced and changed by the filly who comes to share his grandmother's rambling Paris estate. His love for her, his work with her outside the structure of Thoroughbred training and without any guide but old books and his own heart, are Frida's pathway into a renewed relationship with humanity. So much of Perestroika in Paris is magic and thus so much of it is medicine; it's neither fable nor fairy tale nor matter-of-fact relation of animal life, all of these at once and something beyond: a portrait of the horse-hearted in multiple characters. Smiley is too adept a stylist to be accused of head-hopping. Instead she draws on that distant third-person narrator whom by now feels pleasantly archaic, the observer-god, and in doing so achieves a timelessness to which I am not immune.

I don't often seek fiction to be comforted. I have my favorite seasonal rereads, but there are so many new books competing for my attention (they keep publishing them! every week, on Tuesday! the nerve) that I look for challengers, fresh authors, debuts, translations. Yet after a year of years, Smiley's medicine is as welcome as my first shot of Pfizer. Suspended outside of time, the book paints Degas oils of victorious race days, promising a return to railbirding and begging our trust in fallowness, in suspended disbelief, in all the minutiae that builds everyday life and every tiny mechanism operating invisibly beyond our understanding.

Find Perestroika in Paris at your local library or bookstore. If you come away from it newly obsessed with rats, as I did, check out Longuyland legend Bobby Corrigan on the Urban Rodentology episode of Ologies! 

Dreamily yours,
Diana