New West Book Review

Molly Gloss’s “The Hearts of Horses”

By Jenny Shank, 11-16-07

The Hearts of Horses
by Molly Gloss
Houghton Mifflin
304 pages, $24

The Hearts of Horses, the moving and evocative new novel by Oregon writer Molly Gloss, begins with the classic “a stranger comes to town” set up: A tall, lone rider gallops into the fictional Elwha County in Eastern Oregon and begins “looking for horses that need breaking out.” But the year is 1917, and most young ranch hands have gone to fight in World War I, so the rider seeking work is a woman, 19-year-old Martha Lessen.

The narrator informs us that it wasn’t uncommon for young women to train horses in that era.  “Those girls could break horses as well as any man,” Gloss writes, “but they had their own ways of doing it, not such a bucking Wild West show.  They went about it so quiet and deliberate, children would get tired of watching and go off to do something else.”

George Bliss is the first rancher to hire Martha to gentle a pair of horses.  Although he at first seems to be a bit skeptical of Martha, who wears the “old fashioned cowboy trappings” of “fringed batwing chaps” and a “showy big platter of a hat,” he is soon convinced enough by the skills she displays to advertise her services to his neighbors.  He proposes she set up a “circle ride,” training a number of horses dispersed throughout the county in a circuit, riding a horse from one barn to the next, providing Martha with a “winter’s worth of work” that would result in all the neighbors’ horses becoming conditioned for the saddle by spring.

On this circle ride, Martha comes to know the people of the county intimately, because although she is busy with the horses, she serves as one of the only regular links between isolated ranches in the rural countryside, and so she is frequently called on in times of sickness and emergency.  Some of the ranch wives in particular, stuck at home with children and no transportation, look on her with a sort of longing, projecting their needs onto her, and hoping to detain her for a chat over some coffee.

There are many characters in “The Hearts of Horses,” but Gloss makes each of them distinctive, vividly rendering their individual dramas, and at the same time filling the reader in on parts of Oregon history that people like these were a part of.  Some of the horses Martha works with belong to ranchers like the Blisses, who have lived in the area for generations, while others belong to newcomers, lured to the land during a “late homesteading boom” which left new settlers to make do with “a piece of dry land and a scant twelve or fourteen inches of yearly rain.”

Among the newcomers is the Romer family, whose patriarch is an alcoholic.  They live on a claim that is “unsuited for crops,” so they make a living as best they can from selling timber.  Next on Martha’s circle ride route is Walter Irwin, “a bachelor homesteader who had come out from somewhere in New England with money but no knowledge of farming,” and then the Thiedes, a family of German immigrants who suffer persecution during the war.

Of all her employers, some of the most inspiring to Martha are the Woodruff sisters, “two maiden ladies who had grown up on their father’s ranch and had gone on ranching after his death.” Although Martha believes she never wants to marry, she begins a shy courtship with the Woodruff’s hired man, Henry Frazer.

The most affecting portrait of early twentieth century Oregonians that Gloss creates is that of Ruth and Tom Kandel, who run a poultry operation.  During the winter of Martha’s circle ride, Tom is dying of cancer, and Ruth is coping as best she can.  I haven’t read such an incisive and gripping portrait of a wife’s grief for her husband since Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, so I wasn’t surprised to learn, after I finished the book, that Gloss’s own husband had recently died.

Martha is young and somewhat unformed at the beginning of the novel; she studies the people she meets as potential models for the way she plans to live her own life.  She rode off from home “meaning to live a footloose cowboy life and see the places she’d read about in Western romances,” hoping to escape a stifling family life about which Gloss writes, “There had never been any teasing in the house Martha grew up in, just cutting words that meant what they said.”

Martha lives a Spartan existence, bedding down in the Bliss’s barn each night, and has no vices save for a sweet tooth and a weakness for coffee.  As suggested by her attire, Martha longs for an earlier West, when the land wasn’t divided and fenced off.  Just as Martha begins the book as a stranger to the people of Elwha County, she is also a stranger to herself, breaking horses while she works through the process of finding out what sort of woman she will become.

The last chapter, which projects the characters’ lives forward several years, makes the parallels between wartime politics of World War I and those of today more explicit than necessary—the subtle hints that Gloss provided earlier were more effective.  The only other aspect of The Hearts of Horses that I didn’t completely enjoy was its title, which suggests a sentimentality that thankfully isn’t found in the book’s cleareyed prose.  A better title would have been “Circle Ride,” the name of Martha’s journey that serves as a perfect metaphor for the interdependent yet distant families that she encounters.  Whatever its title, however, The Hearts of Horses is a beautifully-written, compelling novel that brings to life rural Oregon of ninety years ago.

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