“Houyhnhnm”
by André Alexis
from the June 20, 2022 issue of The New Yorker
Trinidadian-Canadian writer André Alexis recently completed his five-book series of novels The Quincunx Cycle. The second book in the series, Fifteen Dogs, won the Giller Prize in 2015. I haven’t been following the Giller Prize for a few years, so I have not read it, but I think this whole series sounds worthwhile, as does his 2022 novel Winter, or a Town New Palgrave.
I’m glad we have an opportunity this week to get to know his work a bit through “Houyhnhnm,” which is a reference to the intelligent horses in Gulliver’s Travels. Here is how it starts:
My dad, Robert auf der Horst, died seven years ago. He was a successful doctor, and for most of his life he divided the world into two categories: what he thought useful (science) and what he thought frivolous (almost everything else). It wasn’t that he disdained other things—art, for instance. It was that he couldn’t see the point of pretending that knowledge, the fruit of science, was comparable to entertainment.
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I wasn’t sure what to make of this story. Pleasant to read, and it had a real feel — because Alexis wrote it simply, not making a big deal about the talking horse, just going with it. Thjen I read the interview, in which he said:
Finally, it occurred to me that I could write about a horse’s mental decline as a way of communicating the distress I felt at losing a parent to dementia. In the end, “Houyhnhnm” was a way for me to deal with emotionally nuclear material—my father’s death—from a safe distance, playfully, but without hiding the distress and sadness.”
Which he did, excellently.