I have a daughter who, when you ask her what a movie is about, can spend twenty minutes telling you every detail of everything that happens in the movie, utterly unable to edit herself, entirely oblivious to the notion of "just the highlights". After listening toSeabiscuit, it seems like Laura Hillenbrand suffers from the same inability to self edit.
Seabiscuit's story is full of interesting characters and they can (and have) warranted biographies of their own. Red Pollard, Tom Smith, Charles Howard, George Wolf, and many others, while interesting, had their entire life stories included in this book, and I found myself growing more and more impatient to just get on with the story. Honestly, this book is twice as long as it needs to be, and I didn't find the extra information to be enriching or in any way an enhancement to my enjoyment of Seabiscuit's story. I can appreciate the consequences of a jockey on a rival horse fouling Seabiscuit during a race without knowing that jockey's long history in the sport.
Here's an excerpt:
Charles Howard had the feel of a gigantic onrushing machine: You had to either climb on or leap out of the way. He would sweep into a room, working a cigarette in his fingers, and people would trail him like pilot fish. They couldn't help themselves. Fifty-eight years old in 1935, Howard was a tall, glowing man in a big suit and a very big Buick. But it wasn't his physical bearing that did it. He lived on a California ranch so huge that a man could take a wrong turn on it and be lost forever, but it wasn't his circumstances either. Nor was it that he spoke loud or long; the surprise of the man was his understatement, the quiet and kindly intimacy of his acquaintance. What drew people to him was something intangible, an air about him. There was a certain inevitability to Charles Howard, an urgency radiating from him that made people believe that the world was always going to bend to his wishes.
I think readers can be fairly divided between those who think this is interesting and exciting writing and those, like me, who find it unnecessarily florid and verbose. Listening to this book, I rolled my eyes more than once-- Pollard sequestered himself in the Canadian Wilderness, ahuntin' and afishin'-- and I felt sorry for my impatience because Hillenbrand obviously put much effort into the research and writing of Seabiscuit.
The parts I liked best were the horse races themselves, as exciting as watching them live, but even then there were some clunkers. In once race, after describing the deafening roar of the crowd and the thunderous crash of the pounding hooves, it's said that someone heard Wolf whisper into the Biscuit's ear, "just give me a bit more old pal". (Something like that, as I'm working from memory.) I don't mind authorial omniscience, but don't tell me a jockey's whisper is overheard during a race if you want me to accept that no other liberties were taken with the facts of the story-- a story that is unbelievably dramatic without liberties. You can't help but feel for "the People's Horse", a spirited Thoroughbred that was bought for a song and went on to smash the all time earnings records-- and all while suffering bad luck, fouls from other jockeys, injury, unprecedented handicapping weights, scratching races every time it rained, etc., etc. I can't imagine how much more impressive Seabiscuit's career would have been if he could have just run every time a race came along.
One thing that bothered me in the story was Red Pollard's blindness in his right eye, which he hid from everyone. Early on, Howard and Smith realised that they had a special horse that they felt a great responsibility to foster, and the selfishness of the jockey seemed criminal. Even if he was played by Tobey Maguire as a sympathetic character, I can't bring myself to forgive him. Or see the movie, and perhaps that's the crux of my quibbles: I have avoided seeing the film based on this book because I don't like movies with swelling orchestras and cliché cinematography that try to lead me by the nose, telling me when and how to feel. The language of this book was the equivalent of a full orchestra, all strings and tympanis and trilling flutes. And it was too long.
Overall a great story and a pretty good book.
