STUD

Thoroughbred stallions are an aloof lot, so they don't make a big fuss over being graced with early retirement, plentiful sex, and an enviable cash flow.

New Yorker staff writer Conley provides all the needful color commentary with cool brio and a heart-gladdening display of language. His prose displays an easy grace, lightly worn intelligence, and unbeveled enthusiasm that makes you plain like the guy rather than envy him. He can nail physical appearances: one horse has “a sharp crescent moon way over near his left nostril, a curious marking that makes him look moody and dangerously attractive”; another’s “lips were covered with an unsightly green froth that made him look louche beyond redemption, like a pasture-grazing Henry VIII.” Or he can skewer a whole era: “harebrained conclusions based on zoological minutiae were as typical of the nineteenth century as weird facial hair.” One suspects this writer could tackle any subject with aplomb, but thoroughbred horse-breeding, populated by violent, menacing subjects boasting competitive streaks that border on the criminal, certainly offers a fine canvas for his brush. The horse world is awash with entertaining characters, from bookies and grooms and bloodstock agents to kings, sheikhs, and tax exiles; Conley takes their measure like an expert tailor. He captures the horses’ personalities too, elevating them above the status of sex machines (not that it’s so terrible to earn $20 million annually, as top stud Storm Cat does) and inviting them into the story as genuine characters. Mostly, Conley sticks to the rarified air of thoroughbred farms in Bluegrass Kentucky, that unfussy rolling landscape with its own referents: thoroughbreds must be naturally “covered,” and any offspring produced by artificial insemination will not keep their bloodline. Stud ends, however, with the author standing amidst a herd of wild horses during a driving rain, the whole pack serving as a big weathervane by shifting to keep their butts to the wind.

Simply wonderful.