Track Conditions

by Michael Klein

In 1979, Michael Klein, an aspiring singer/songwriter living in New York City, was broke, friendless, and drinking too much. When his lover, Richard, left him to work on a race track, Klein followed, and so began his extraordinary five-year sojourn on tracks in Ohio, New York, Florida, and finally Kentucky. At the 110th running of the Kentucky Derby, where he was groom to the winning horse, Klein was led from the winner's circle into the center of a tragic mystery, and then into a new life. The race track put me in a kind of awe...It was a world inside a world...a labyrinth of luck, into and out of which the horses I walked every day were leading me. Among dissolute hired hands, in shedrows and tack rooms where men who care for horses also have sex, and in smoky after-hours bars, Klein tries to stop drinking, but can't; he tries to stay with Richard, but can't. He begins to have a recurring dream, strangely prophetic: a horse appearing as Richard disappears. And he revisits his past: his step-father introducing him to gambling and sex; his mother's sudden death. Then the dreamed-of horse arrives.

Genres: Memoir, Horses, Horse Racing

178 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Sassafras Patterdale · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've read in a long time. I heard Michael Klein read a passage from this book at Goddard College and immediately had to buy the book. I wasn't disappointed! I really appreciated the blending of obscure animal experience in this case - race horses (complicated for sure from an animal perspective) with trauma, with queerness, with love, with desire, with fear, with addiction, with the love of a man and a horse.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set against the fast-paced backdrop of the Kentucky horse racing milieu, this memoir is counter-pointed by the slow and deliberate development of Klein's life - a life built through the struggle to slowly uncover his identity while caring for one of the world's premier race horses

Klein is a masterful and poetic writer. His sentences are often lyrical, yet accessible. His mastery of the juxtaposition of subtleness and in-your-face storytelling is superb.

Wanting to avoid spoilers, I will only offer that this book, while a memoir, also allows for development of character and place, an often difficult balancing act.

Having read this book multiple times, and having used it in classes I have taught at universities, it is on my list of "500 Must Reads Before You Die."

Track Conditions: A Memoir

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not interested in the horsey set, but I am interested in the dipsomaniacal sodomitic set and how that set navigates through the horsey set. I fell under Michael Klein's spell of dazzling prose and insights that singed and left their mark like a the wet ring go a glass on a coffee table.

[Caryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Klein's memoir from his racetrack days is penned with brilliant prose. His tale grabbed me on a couple levels, as a lifelong horse person, as the widow of a high functioning alcoholic horseman, and as an avid reader who appreciates a well crafted memoir. The author knows how to engage readers with his adventures, and he does so with total candor, no matter how gritty the tale is. Klein's insights into the inner workings of track life, as well as of his journey with alcohol, afforded me more understanding of both scenarios and how they interact.

[Tatiana · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not a huge memoir person, but my roommate is and she recommended this as one of her favorite memoirs. what's nice about it is that the author is by trade a poet, so it reads much more eloquently than memoirs usually do.

[Scoobs-buddy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book