Horses Follow

The dominant image in John Hawkes's new novel is a well-known painting of a horse called Whistlejacket. The artist was George Stubbs, an Englishman who lived from 1724 to 1806 and is remembered for the amazing accuracy of representation he achieved in a body of work largely devoted to horse portraiture; many of his anatomical drawings, generated from the corpses of horses he himself killed and then painstakingly dissected, have never been bettered. Questions of representation, of the layers of meaning that come to light when surfaces are peeled back to expose the dark structures within, are central to ''Whistlejacket.'' It is a book about dissection and exposure, a point that the author emphasizes by placing at its center his account of George Stubbs's life and work.