Painted Horses, by Malcolm Brooks
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Painted Horses, by Malcolm Brooks
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“Engrossing . . . The best novels are not just written but built—scene by scene, character by character—until a world emerges for readers to fall into. Painted Horses creates several worlds in a seamless and ambitious blend of history, romance, archaeology and nature. . . . Hard to forget.” —Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today (4 out of 4 stars)In the mid-1950s, America was flush with prosperity and saw an unbroken line of progress clear to the horizon, while the West was still very much wild. In Painted Horses, now in paperback, a dauntless woman travels into that untamed landscape in an adventure that will change her life. Catherine Lemay is a young archaeologist who’s come to Montana with a huge task before her—a canyon “as deep as the devil’s own appetites.” Working ahead of a major dam project, she has one summer to prove nothing of historical value will be lost in the flood. From the moment she arrives, nothing is what she expects. John H is a former mustanger with an intuitive genius for breaking horses. A veteran of the U.S. Army’s last mounted cavalry campaign, he lives a fugitive life, driven by pursuit of one last wild thing. John H inspires Catherine to see beauty in the stark landscape, and her heart opens to more than just the vanished past. Painted Horses sings a love song to the horseman’s vanishing way of life and reminds us that love and ambition, tradition and progress, often make strange bedfellows.“Extraordinary . . . Surprising and satisfying . . . Brooks has fashioned compelling and sympathetic protagonists. . . . John H—orphan, rail rider, cowboy, World War II veteran, Paris artist, canyon hermit—in particular, has a backstory that is both intimate and sweeping in a way that may remind readers of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. . . . Painted Horses is, after all, one of those big, old-fashioned novels where the mundane and the unlikely coexist.”—Kent Black, Boston Globe“Malcolm Brooks’ novel has the hard thrill of the West, when it was still a new world, the tenderness of first love and the pain of knowledge. This book is a gripping, compulsively readable page-turner.”—Amy Bloom, author of Away
Painted Horses, by Malcolm Brooks - Amazon Sales Rank: #703245 in Books
- Brand: Brooks, Malcolm
- Published on: 2015-06-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.20" h x 1.20" w x 5.40" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 384 pages
Painted Horses, by Malcolm Brooks Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, August 2014: It’s tempting to dismiss Malcolm Brooks’s debut as the latest in a series of American epics treading on Cormac McCarthy territory: The Son, Fourth of July Creek, and The Kept come to mind as recent novels dealing with the darker realities of frontiers, both geographical and personal. Like The Son, Painted Horses positions itself at the moment the frontier era gives way to modernity: in mid-century Montana, a dam project threatens to flood a canyon historically inhabited by Native Americans, submerging thousands of years of Crow history under hundreds of feet of slack water. When the inexperienced Catherine Lemay is appointed to survey the canyon for cultural evidence that could thwart the dam-builders, she assumes one corner of a Faustian triangle with a scheming hydroelectric shill and the mysterious John H., a rugged, reticent horse whisperer who opens the secrets of the country to the young archaeologist. Tangled relationships, difficult decisions, and hard compromises ensue. Decades and continents are spanned, and history unfolds. Maybe we’ve read this before?
But dismissing Painted Horses for its Western tropes would ignore just how good this book is. Brooks's prose is stylistically bold, announcing his artistic aspirations from the opening sentence. His characters are carefully drawn, yet their intentions remain ambiguous enough to be authentically human. His Montana is vivid, wild, and broad, and it’s obvious that Brooks lives where he writes, and loves where he lives. Ultimately, Brooks accomplishes no small feat in this remarkable debut: a tale of literary ambition that lives comfortably inside its genre roots, but not by its conventions.--Jon Foro
From Booklist Set in an American West of the 1950s but carrying vestiges of the nineteenth century, and with Indian artifacts and the ancestry of wild horses going back even earlier, much of this novel, like its milieu, has a timeless feel. Catherine Lemay is a young archaeologist hired to explore a Montana canyon slated for damming and destruction, although she may have been hired specifically to find nothing, no evidence of why some of the local Crow Indians oppose construction of the dam. She is aided by Miriam, a young Crow woman (whose centenarian great-grandmother connects back to the Greasy Grass and Custer), and assisted (or not) by local horsemen and townspeople with a variety of interests in the land’s future. Two of the horsemen, including the enigmatic John H, served together in the mounted cavalry in wartime Italy, and, though some readers will rightly find in Brooks’ themes suggestions of Jim Harrison or Cormac McCarthy, the lengthy wartime flashbacks nicely recall vintage Hemingway. The book loses some credibility as it develops more contemporary plot elements, but its vividly drawn atmosphere and strong characters will keep the reader engaged. --Mark Levine
Review Praise for Painted Horses:National BestsellerOne of Amazon’s 100 Best Books of 2014#1 Indie Next Great Read for August 2014A Barnes & Noble Discover SelectionAmazon Debut Spotlight for August 2014“Engrossing . . . The best novels are not just written but built—scene by scene, character by character—until a world emerges for readers to fall into. Painted Horses creates several worlds.” —USA Today (4 out of 4 stars)“Extraordinary . . . both intimate and sweeping in a way that may remind readers of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient . . . Painted Horses is, after all, one of those big, old-fashioned novels where the mundane and the unlikely coexist.”—Boston Globe“Malcolm Brooks’ novel has the hard thrill of the West, when it was still a new world, the tenderness of first love and the pain of knowledge. This book is a gripping, compulsively readable page-turner.”—Amy Bloom, author of Away“Painted Horses reads like a cross between Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, with a pinch of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient for good measure. . . . An earnest, romantic novel.”—The Dallas Morning News“Lush, breathtaking prose that expertly captures the raw essence of an American West known for its wide-open spaces and unbridled spirit. . . . Masterful.” —San Francisco Chronicle“Reminiscent of the fiery, lyrical and animated spirit of Cormac McCarthy’s Border trilogy, and the wisdom and elegance of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, Painted Horses is its own work, a big, old-fashioned and important novel.”—Rick Bass, author of All the Land to Hold Us“Evocative . . . Brooks’ prose rings true.”—The Seattle Times“Painted Horses is evidence that the many-peopled, colorific, panoramic, fully-wraparound, pull-you-in-by-the-heels, big-questions, literarily deft ‘Great American Novel’ still lives.”—Carolyn Chute, author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine and Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves“Grandly romantic . . . Blood. Sex. War. Equine Expertise. Past versus Progress. Money versus Love and Sacred Places. One can almost hear Hollywood’s horsemen rumbling toward this tale.” —Orion “Painted Horses is a wonderful novel full of horses, archeology, the new West, and two fascinating women. Malcolm Brooks should be lauded for this amazing debut. Very fine.”—Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall and Brown Dog“Painted Horses vividly evokes an earlier time, a place and a way of being that is at the cusp of great change. In his gift for the language of horses and the culture of horsemen, Brooks will inevitably recall Cormac McCarthy. And like Ivan Doig in Bucking the Sun, he mines one of the darker veins in the mythology of the American West”—The Washington Post “A love song to the Western frontier, Painted Horses is a new, truly American, work of art.”—San Antonio Current“Malcolm Brooks has the same intuitive understanding of women that his character John H has of horses. Painted Horses is a beautiful, sensual, authentic novel. A western novel that is about so much more than the West, it is an exquisite, enthralling debut.”—Lily King, author of Euphoria“The next great western novel . . . Vivid—and often romantic . . . The past echoes through the canyons of the West in this richly layered first novel.”—The Daily Beast“Ambitious and affecting . . . A sweeping and dramatic saga.”—Big Sky Journal
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74 of 82 people found the following review helpful. A marvelous sprawling literary modern-day Western love story By B. Case "Painted Horses," by Malcolm Brooks, is a stunning novel brimming with confident literary prose. It is hard to believe that this big bold masterful modern-day Western is the work of a debut novelist. It begins with an arresting sentence fragment: "London, even the smell of it." And then the author keeps breaking the rules and stretching the literary envelope. For me, the style was delightfully brazen. Best of all, it transported me intimately inside the narrative--I became emotionally part of the story. Everything felt real: the time, the place, the characters...especially the narrative.It's one of those big sprawling stories that stretched across two continents and three decades. The novel contained lots of background stories in order to get the characterizations just right, yet the author managed expertly to focus all that detail on only what was necessary to support the love story at its core.The key action takes place in the summer of 1956. The setting is a massive, 50-mile-long canyon in Montana's incredible badlands. A power company plans to build a dam across the canyon to generate hydroelectric power. The dam is controversial. Some locals look forward to the new jobs and modern lifestyle that the dam promises; others are disturbed about the potential loss of sacred ancient native sites. Before the power company can start work, they need to get an archeologist to examine the canyon to make sure the water behind the dam will not flood anything historically significant. The archeologist chosen for the assignment is Catherine Lamay, a 23-year-old graduate with no field experience whatsoever in Western archeology or ancient Native American artifacts. She has only a few weeks to complete her assignment. She's eager to begin and highly motivated to do a thorough job. In addition, she is fearless and reckless--a trait that often comes naturally with youth.Catherine hires two people to assist her: Jack Allen, a despicable man who earns his living capturing wild mustangs for dog food and Mirium, a seventeen-year-old Native American girl. Jack's job is to safely transport Catherine and Mirium into the canyon on horseback supported by a mule team. Mirium's job is to provide a Native American perspective. Is Jack working for the power company and purposefully trying to steer Catherine away from finding what she seeks?Eventually, Catherine meets and falls in love with John H. The author never says what H stands for, many people simply even call him H. He's 38 years old and a natural horse whisperer--the type of man who can tame a wild horse in little more than a day by gaining the animal's trust through body language. He's also an artist who paints impressionistic drawings of horses running free. He has the signature habit of painting odd things (like the backside of his horse) with his own handprint using yellow dye. He appears to be living hidden in the canyon. Time and again he comes to Catherine's aid.John H is a complex, mysterious, and fascinating man. The book contains a lot of background stories about his hardscrabble life. These stories are told from John H's point of view in the third-person present tense...as if this character is reliving his past with us, the reader. All the sections about Catherine and Catherine's life up to her meeting with John, are told in the past tense...as if John H were relating these stories to us, the reader, just has he heard them from Catherine. All the stories about Catherine and John H together are done in the present tense from John H's perspective. This is one of the stylistic elements that pulled me inside the book and kept me compulsively turning pages. I felt like I was reliving John H's life through his mind, focusing on the most important moments leading up to and including his relationship with Catherine.This book is so sprawling, and the detail so penetrating and memorable, if it were ever turned into a movie, it would be a major miniseries. Oh, how I wish that would happen! That would make this memorable, cinematic, all-American, and emotionally satisfying story accessible to the masses.I loved this book and highly recommend it. This novel is not without its faults, but the overall effect was so positive, I was eager to give it five stars. I'm sure it will not please everyone and many readers may object it's style and faults. There will probably be just as many readers who love this book as those who didn't like it very much at all. Isn't that's often the way with many books that stretch the literary envelope?I hope this review will help those who might appreciate and enjoy this fine novel. If Malcolm Brooks can continue to produce books of this caliber, I'm sure he will gain high stature in this important literary genre.
45 of 51 people found the following review helpful. Excellent; superb By I Do The Speed Limit I wish I could leave my comment like that: Just those two words. So I don't disturb the mood it created in me.But, I can't get away with that, can I? So, here I go: Trying to share it with you:I love the way this author writes. He writes what his mind is thinking. He ignores proper punctuation and sentence structure if the thought demands it. Don't interpret this to mean that the book is hard to read. No, it is not. Definitely not. It took me a few pages to get into the flow of it, then my reading took off flying.It's a great story about a young woman, recently out of a top college in the East and now into the workplace as an archaeologist for the Smithsonian. She is full of herself after returning from a coveted archaeological assignment in London. Now, she's out of her element and into the wild expanse of Montana. She walks naively into Power, with a capital P in more ways than one: Big money, big business, mean, controlling, dominant men without a speck of respect and no consciences.Disillusionment follows--big time. Anger and frustration and a sense of futility almost break her. But she digs her heals in, hires on a young Indian girl to help her, and tries to find evidence that will prevent the building of a hydroelectric dam and the flooding of a sacred canyon.It's also a great story about a man, somewhat older--and wiser--than the woman; he is one with the wild mustangs and the canyon. His life is not an easy one, and necessity and common sense have him breaking laws before he's out of his teens. He also lives to paint pictures of horses.Her story; his story; the overlapping of their stories: That is this story, and it is a fine one.You should not miss it. I read a lot of books, most of them not spectacular. But I keep reading because I know that every once in a while I run into one like this. I'm so glad I stumbled upon it. I will watch for this Malcolm Brooks in the future.
38 of 43 people found the following review helpful. Deeply Riveting / Beautifully Written By Susannah St Clair Foxy Loxy The depth of this book truly amazes me. Emotional depth and historical depth. Malcolm Brooks must have spent a year on the historical background alone. I learned a bit about so many things. A close up of the second world war in Europe, a snippet about cave drawings over in Europe as well. Archaeology in general and the still quite wild west of the late 50's. All this mixed together with lyrical prose and incredible descriptions of the people and the land makes for a superbly engrossing new novel. There are several strong characters that the author brings to life and one of them is the land on which the story is created. Montana.. the old west and the now west. It is mystical and brutal as are the people who inhabit it. Catherine Lemay as a very young archaeologist who is tapped by the Smithsonian to be part of River Basin Surveys to see if there is anything of historical value in a canyon that the power company wants to flood for a new dam. It doesn't take her long to realize that the Harris Power and Light wants her there, young and untested ,so they can manipulate her toward rubber stamping the project and then they can build their dam and make their money. They found out they picked the wrong woman. There are two very strong male leads, John H. and Jack Allen. At first, the reader has to wonder who the love interest is going to be. One I took an instant dislike to, the other, I wasn't quite sure what he was, hero or a lost soul from a different time. The story weaves itself between the woman, these two men and the animals that live on seemingly desolate land. Finally Catherine gives her heart to one and comes close to losing her life because of something she finds of great importance. At the end, she choses between antiquity and the man she has come to love… in order to find out which won over her soul, you have to read the book. A wonderful, richly endowed story of so many lives living and dead.For me, this one's a keeper and deep enough and complicated enough that it will need more than just one read through.
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