196 of 205 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nominated for the National Book Award., November 6, 2010
This review is from: Lord of Misrule (Hardcover)
Of course, LORD OF MISRULE is the name of a horse. It resonates well with anarchy, chaos theory. The splendid dust jacket picture on this novel shows a lone horse and exercise rider coming down the track out of the misty nothingness. How apt for this fine literary horseracing novel, an underdog longshot from a small press but now nominated for the National Book Award.
The book is about one year in the life of typical small-time trainers and backstretch workers. The comparison here with Damon Runyon's fiction is hard to avoid. Jaimy Gordon's characters have names like Tommy Hansel and his girlfriend, Maggie Koderer; the gypsy Deucey Gifford; the veteran black groom, Medicine Ed; Kiddstuff the blacksmith; Suitcase Smithers the stall superintendent; Two-Tie the grifter racetrack tout; and the leading trainer, Joe Dale Bigg. Their horses carry names such as Pelter, Little Spinoza, The Mahdi, Railroad Joe, Mr. Boll Weevil, and of course Lord Of Misrule.
Archetypes or stereotypes, take your pick. Either way, much of this novel rings true with this reader, who began working on the backstretch at age twelve, selling newspapers, and who, as an adult, owned and raced his own horses for many years, sometimes at such minor tracks as in the novel, including Beulah Park and River Downs.
Parts of the book seem like the familiar lyrics an old song heard once again, containing both high comedy and deep insight. Here from this novel is the typical lament of the veteran racetracker, Medicine Ed, no doubt true now and always, but certainly true back in the time of this novel, set in 1970:
"Seem like every day since time he been thinking what a shame and pity it is how the world is coming down, how the pride of work has disappeared, until they just laugh at him, the boys that come on the racetrack now--how the horses is misused and abused, started out racing too young before they bones is hard, not rested proper and dosed with all kind of shots and pills, and so consequently don't last--how these five and dime horse trainers and they ten-cent owners anymore be tighter than the bark on a beech tree, when it come to anything but rush rush rush them horses back to the track and collect a bet. It ain't no real sportsmen round here no more, if it ever was, or either sportswomen. And John Q. Public wasn't no dumber than he used to was, but also he ain't no smarter."
I liked the opening metaphor of the automated hot-walking machine: "the going-nowhere contraption" you can't get around, comparing it to the lost souls of the backstretch life itself, going round and round, saying that "right down to the sore horses at each point of the silver star, it resembled some woebegone carnival ride, some skeleton of a two-bit ride dreamed up by a dreamer too tired to dream."
Rather than using the actual historic names for horses, the author uses proper names that might resonate with her deeper themes. For example, speaking of thoroughbred bloodlines, rather than writing, say, "this was the blood of Man O War," she writes "this was the blood of Platonic," the words of Plato resonating with her twinning of the male and female protagonists, each in search of its other half to make themselves whole again.
I don't have any major complaints, but I do have quibbles. She gives the power to write races to the stall superintendent rather than to the racing secretary. Well, this is fiction. Part of her racetrack vernacular is historic and part of it is obviously the author's own invention, so much of it well done yet her so often repeated use of "go-fer," "goofer," and "gaffer" grated on this reader after a while like Gomer Pyle's drawn out "gol-ley." At one point she describes the chestnut coat of a particular racehorse as whiskey red, and a few pages later compares it to the color of old fire hydrants. She should have stuck with whiskey.
Gypsy was a common racetrack term back in the days when racetrack meetings were short. The self-described gypsy horsemen I knew in the past were always small-time owner/trainers who traveled from track to track like migrant workers and resided lightly in tack rooms and horse vans. It was only their mobile life which made them gypsies. Most caught in this life were, like Medicine Ed in this novel, always hoping to find a place to settle down, looking for a home.
The narrative drive in the opening ten chapters is nicely paced, but after that it becomes a tad disjointed, too episodic, and the book needed its girth tightened in the middle. The narrative picks up the bit toward the end and finishes well.
Over all, this is a damned fine novel. My picks for the very best ten novels of 2010 include such high quality longshots as Robert Flynn's excellent ECHOES OF GLORY, Clancy Martin's amazing HOW TO SELL: A NOVEL, James Hynes's NEXT, and Paul Harding's TINKERS. I wasn't familiar with those announced as nominated for the National Book Award, but now if LORD OF MISRULE should win it, I won't be too disappointed or too surprised.
If you enjoyed LORD OF MISRULE and are looking for similar works expressing the poetry, comedy, and tragedy of racetrack life, I suggest you read Bill Barich's excellent LAUGHING IN THE HILLS, a fine work of creative non-fiction. Also fine are Carol Flakes' TARNISHED CROWN and Jane Smiley's A YEAR AT THE RACES and her novel, HORSE HEAVEN. And if you want to see a first-hand account of what backstretch life was like during the time of this particular novel, see Billie Young's BITS & PIECES OF THE BACK SIDE.
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31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
this sport will drive you mad, March 15, 2011
I've been trying to think of a way to discuss this book in an intelligent manner since I received it a few months ago, which, incidentally, is about as long as it took me to finish it. I got stuck about two thirds in, which is usually when I throw up my hands and start screaming, "What did I do to deserve this?! I quit!" and yet I buckled down and picked it back up again. So here we are.
There are things that I love about this book. The ending of the first chapter hooked me. Granted, there are only five chapters in Lord of Misrule, so there were plenty of pages of pondering whether or not I could do this, but I was determined.
The premise is this: Indian Mound Downs is a backwoods racetrack near Wheeling. It is the 1970s, a time period that does well to emphasize just how downtrodden this track is when the likes of Secretariat, Seattle Slew, Affirmed, Alydar, and Ruffian were running around in what is arguably American racing's last great decade. Tommy Hansel and Maggie appear at the track with a group of claimers, hoping to get in quick and cash out faster. Their plans are not exactly going to work out, mainly because Maggie is horse crazy (she's one of those characters, complete with the lack of hairbrush ownership) and the fact that Tommy is simply going crazy. At the track already is a group of various characters, all just barely managing to hack out a living with horses that are old and broke down and keep running because their options are that limited. Gordon does a phenomenal job with the horses in all ways, which was one of the highlights of the book. For me, however, she really sold me on aging groom Medicine Ed and his goofer dust, used only when absolutely necessary since it tends to even the scales in some way. Sure, sprinkling a little bit of it in the stall of a horse you want to win might pay off in the short term, but that horse probably won't live to see the next morning.
Another aspect that I fell in love with was Tommy's sanity. It comes and goes, but he is always written in the second person (heavy-handed, maybe) and that just drives it home. However, for as crazy as he winds up being, he's just fully awesome. In a scary psycho way that the author doesn't shy away from.
But the book did wind up losing me, and it wound up doing that for two reasons: rambling and lack of story. There isn't a lot of story in this book. In fact, what plot there is would probably be more suited to a novella or short story than a full-length novel. It's padded with pages and pages and pages of description and tangents that might have been called character development if I felt they had been headed in that direction. Instead they only seemed to drown out the vibrancy of the characters and left me wanting. There is such a thing as too much, and I think this book hit it over and over again. The plot...while definitely recognizable at the end, was shaky in the beginning. If you're not careful, you can miss it entirely and find yourself wondering just what is going on by the middle of the book.
Also, there are no quotation marks. If that irks you, you'll loathe it. It's my personal opinion that lack of quotation marks works only if you're using your words sparingly. This novel is full to overflowing with words, so it's easy to get lost and forced to start sentences over.
So...all together I'd say that there are moments in this book that I loved. Moments I wish had stretched out and kept hooking me to the end, but unfortunately there were too many long moments of navel-gazing that knocked over my interest. Did I get it back again? Yes. It was just hard getting there.
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