Makar9: January 2012

When the Gates Open

Gordon, Jaimy. Lord of
Misrule. McPherson and Company, 2010.

At the race track Lady Luck is
never good enough. You need divine intervention to stand on the winner’s line
with a smile. Or, as Gordon says in the words of old Medicine Ed, “I tell you a
secret, horse racing is not no science. Some of em tries to make it a science,
with the drugs and chemicals and that, but ma’fact it’s more like a religion.
It’s a clouded thing. You can’t see through it. It come down to a person’s
beliefs. One person believe this and the other person believe that. It’s like
the National Baptists bandage and the Southern Baptists use liniment, you see
what I’m trying to say? Nobody exactly knows.”

The ritual bugle call at a racetrack brings blood to the ears; one’s
heart pumps faster. But what goes on before the race, behind the pageant? What
is life like among the trainers and stable help in the stalls amid the hay and
muck? Jaimy Gordon will let you experience not only the breath steaming from
the nostril of a walking horse but the weather-lined characters who lead a
horse through the morning mist before dawn: “in a silver fog that beaded up the
cobwebs and the horses’ eyelashes.”

Gordon’s narrative, which imitates the traditional four pacing quarters
of a race, runs with dirt flying and flaky nags burdened with personalities
more complex than their owners. Reviewers have compared her work to Nathaniel
West’s or William Faulkner’s (he died of a fall from a horse) because of its
deep lyricism and energetic syntax, but the narrative voice and turf is her own
inimitable creation—quirky, dense, and electric. Gordon’s plot revolves around low-down
claiming races, where scheming, performance, rivalry, speculation, and revenge
enhance the drama at rural pokeweed track races.

In terms of literary genealogy the novel’s ancestors consist of Jim
Tully’s Circus Parade (1927), John Steinbeck’s
1938 short story “Chrysanthemums,” and especially John Hawkes’s novel about horse
racing in England,
The Lime Twig (1961). While not as elliptical as Hawkes, Gordon’s
crafted narrative offers an accessible grittiness and spunk. Her poetic
realism, with an optimistic strain, comes from the best down-home roustabout
stable in American literature—writers like John Fante, Eudora Welty, and
William Kennedy, all of whom have the capacity to delineate characters with
vivid strokes of the pen.

Gordon possesses a subtle irony and laconic edge that makes you think
about, and care for, characters who reveal a different world, a world in which we
are hypnotized to dwell with wrenching emotion, that cathartic thing Aristotle
appreciated. She displays an acute ear for the subtle rhythms of spoken conversation,
replete with the eloquence of racy, demotic speech yet with the ability to paint
the darker, more suggestive, and ambiguous inner hues of self-deception, revealing
layers of anxiety as well as oddball charm.

Set in about 1970, the novel is organized as a quartet. Four braided stories
cover four claiming races, each race featuring an equine protagonist with
personality that is nearly human: Mr. Boll Weevil, a folkloric hero; Little
Spinoza, the feckless wonder; Pelter, the dignified, old-forgotten champion,
whose surprising victory produces a backwoods dénouement where the horse
witnesses the hysterical farce of obsessed men; Lord of Misrule provides a
stretch-run chaotic reversal.

The novel sports a stable core of three narrating characters, an interlocking
network of secrets: a 72-year-old black groom possessed of life’s hard-earned
wisdom, an ambitious Irish trainer out for a big score (whose narrative occurs
in the second person), and a young Jewish drifter tomboy smitten by him. She is
the principal protagonist—in danger from predatory, insensitive, nearly idiotic
men.

Any quartet presents a musical
structure of mood: the first story explores the flirtatious and dangerous shadows
of youthful erotic sadomasochism (an element found in Hawkes); the second story
highlights the mutual plotting and camaraderie of the three narrators with
momentary triumphant success (like a Eudora Welty story); the third engages the
reader with a desperate web of intrigue that involves small-time seedy gangsters
(like William Kennedy’s Albany novels); the fourth story unravels everything
topsy-turvy—as Lord of Misrule’s name indicates—in apocalyptic climax (like
West’s Day of the Locust or Fante’s Ask the Dust). Allusions to folklore and
myth flit through this cycle of stories like wispy anthropomorphic clouds, but
it’s the carnival dust of the loser’s racetrack that lingers. An elegiac epilogue
sums up the varied threads with effective near-closure.

If you are looking for a superlative read that rings clear and true like
a hammer striking a horseshoe, Gordon will take you to the wire, yet before
that she will take your breath away with mud-slinging lyrical slang. Every book
Gordon writes offers a new map of American grit and off-beat humor.

As a youth, the author once worked for three years at race tracks in Vermont and West
Virginia where the novel is set. That this 2010
National Book Award winner has the local backing of a small press in the Hudson Valley,
in Kingston, N.Y., remains exciting as it is astonishing.
—Kevin T. McEneaney is the author of the award-winning Tom Wolfe’s America: Heroes, Pranksters, and
Fools.

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