Susan Mihalic, Dark Horses
Lolita bites back in Dark Horses, a freshman effort by novelist Susan Mihalic.
There are depths of experience so profoundly plumbed by our literary forebears that no writer who hopes to sound them can avoid comparison. Writing a battle scene? Homer and Tolstoy are the giants you must fight. Penning a private eye? Hammett, Chandler, and MacDonald (to name a few) stand between you and your place in the canon of crime. And, as in the present case, if you take on the sexual exploitation of young women, it’s Nabokov with whom you’ll contend. None of these literary ghosts wish you ill. But they do demand you show yourself worthy. They’ll make room for you, if it’s room you deserve.
In Mihalic’s Dark Horses, high-school junior Roan Montgomery is an up-and-coming competitive rider, a darling of the equestrian set, a secret drinker, and her coach and Olympic gold medalist Monty Montgomery’s lover. The relationship would be problematic enough if the elder Montgomery were not her father. Yet he is, and Roan’s abuse at his hands extends deep into her childhood. Mihalic’s tale is one of an athlete at the highest level, managing the rigors of her sport even as she juggles schoolwork, the tempestuousness of an alcoholic, emotionally unavailable mother, and her own yearning for adolescent romance. All of this, as she struggles with her own sense of complicity in Monty’s depredations and fights to regain control of her sexual being. As her resistance mounts, so does Monty’s determination to control her contacts, her affections, her very movements. And, of course, her body. Ultimately, it will require an act both desperate and extreme to free her of her father’s priapic talons. This is an escape story, and it is a heroic one.
Mihalic’s deep knowledge of the equestrian universe informs this tale at every turn. One feels the jumps, the grass-scouring landings, the precision of dressage. One smells the deep aroma of sweating horses, knows their angers and affections and fear. Honestly, I don’t particularly like horses, but Mihalic’s novel made me wish to be among them.
But can Dark Horses nudge Lolita aside enough that Mihalic might stand at Nabokov’s side on this particular podium? I would answer with a resounding yes. Like Nabokov’s, Mihalic’s is a first-person narrative, forgoing the ironic misanthropy of Monsieur Humbert for the dauntlessness of a young woman who recognizes her oppression but refuses to be defined by it, who insists at any cost upon becoming free. Both Nabokov and Mihalic understand that the intrusion of sexuality into a parent-child relationship destroys any prospect of actual intimacy. Though monstrously jealous, neither Montgomery pere nor Humbert-squared know the hearts of these girl children for whom they are charged to care. In the opposite direction, the knowing is deeper, or at least grows so — Roan and Lolita are survivors, and a survivor must know her abuser’s whim.
More, in reading Lolita decades after my first perusal, I find myself fatigued by Humbert’s compulsive, fussy wordplay (not to mention the obnoxious improbability of preteen Lolita’s initiating their first sexual congress). Roan’s is the lucid voice of a young woman coming to know her worth, understanding she has only herself upon whom to rely, and determining that — no matter the cost — the hand that guides her destiny will be her own.
So buy this book. Seriously. Do it now. You’ll find Dark Horses at your local bookseller (better) or at bookshop.org (almost as good). Mihalic’s is a fresh vision and hers will be an important one. Saddle up, boots in the stirrups, and start the ride.
