Lord of Misrule

by Jaimy Gordon

A brilliant novel that captures the dusty, dark, and beautiful world of small-time horse racing, where trainers, jockeys, grooms and grifters vie for what little luck is offered at a run-down West Virginia track .

Tommy Hansel has a plan: run four horses, all better than they look on paper, at long odds at Indian Mound Downs, then grab the purse -- or cash a bet -- and run before anyone’s the wiser. At his side is Maggie Koderer, who finds herself powerfully drawn to the gorgeous, used up animals of the cheap track. She also lands in the cross-hairs of leading trainer Joe Dale Bigg. But as news of Tommy’s plan spreads, from veteran groom Medicine Ed, to loan shark Two-Tie, to Kidstuff the blacksmith, it’s Maggie, not Tommy or the handlers of legendary stakes horse Lord of Misrule, who will find what's valuable in a world where everything has a price.

Genres: Fiction, Horses, Literary Fiction, Book Club, Novels, Sports, Animals

296 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Jaimy Gordon's third novel, Bogeywoman was on the Los Angeles Times list of Best Books for 2000. Her second novel, She Drove Without Stopping, brought her an Academy-Institute Award for her fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Gordon's short story, "A Night's Work," which shares a number of characters with Lord of Misrule, appeared in Best American Short Stories 1995. She is also the author of a novella, Circumspections from an Equestrian Statue, and the fantasy classic novel Shamp of the City-Solo. Gordon teaches at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and in the Prague Summer Program for Writers.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 5 out of 5]

”She had her highborn air, dexter, and right next to it she had her lowborn air, sinister, which also came of being a Jew, an outcast, a gypsy, and not giving one goddamn. She could up and follow a racetracker, a coarse adventurer, if she so chose. Moreover you could get to her through her body. It was a black, rich, well-watered way, between rock faces.

The word podzol came to mind.

The word humus. Soil. Slut.

You could ask all you wanted of that flesh, you could whisper outrages into her ear and, no matter what she said, the flesh would tremble and fall open to you.”



It all begins when Maggie Korderer shows up at the Indian Mound Downs in Wheeling, West Virginia, in a battered, white Grand Prix and asks for four stalls for horses. She has no idea she is about to meet a cast of characters whose names sound like they stepped out of the pages of a comic book. These people are more tangible than most real people: Suitcase Smithers, Old lady “gyp” Deucey Gifford, Kidstuff the Blacksmith, Medicine Ed, and Joe Dale Bigg.

She fell in lust with a racetracker named Tommy Hansel. Medicine Ed sums him up quickly: ”But the young fool? Something have made him think he big when he small and strong when he weak, something have set him thinking he the king when he ain’t nothing. Long as he think he king, he can’t see how low he is, don’t know to ask the bad luck to leave him while it’s still time, and put it back on them that brung it and send it back to the Devil where it come from.”

Sometimes the Devil is in desire, or in a horse, or in a man, and sometimes it can be in a woman, too.

”When he came home in the afternoon from the track and she from the paper, they were in bed in five minutes, with all of it: newsprint and horse manure, saddle leather, ink and hashish, past performance charts and food pages, sweet feed and recipes for blancmange and corn souffle. The sheets literally reeked of all that. The sweat-damp canyons of the featherbed were gritty with their mixture. In some way their unmiscible lives fused.”

Maggie didn’t expect to fall in love with horses. She came to the business for the man, but ended up staying for the horses. They are beautiful animals, even the ones that have fallen so far down the ladder as to be running at tracks in $5000 races where anyone could buy any horse in the race for that amount. It’s a brutal existence with Goofer Powder and syringes full of juice that take a little more of the soul of the animal during every race.

Jaimy Gordon is at times so lyrical that I found myself rereading lines several times just to squeeze all the honey out of the language. ”An hour before Little Spinoza’s first race they sat around in a funeral mood--all except Little Spinoza who stood in his bucket of ice as cool as a Tiffany cocktail stirrer, dreaming in black jewerly eyes of emerald alfalfa and clover of Burmese jade.”

This is a literary book; and yet, there are also these great hardboiled lines that add this beautiful edge to the writing. Joe Dale Bigg is a gangster who fixes races to keep his cash flow stable. He gets one whiff of Maggie, and he wants her. He wants to hurt her. He has a plan on how he will arrange things so that she has to come to him. ”Hey, didn’t I figure you right? Isn’t that what you like? Somebody who can reach his hand up inside you and tell you what disease you’re dying of.”

Medicine Ed is watching this witches brew of chaos and knows better than just about anyone what the future will be. His eyes are ancient eyes glutted with the past. The possible outcomes of the narratives of all our lives have all been played before. When Ed, Maggie, and Deucey buy a horse in an attempt to be more than they’ve ever been before, they have allowed the Devil a chance to tickle their necks with his hot breath and whisper in their ears the consequences of failure.

Thoughts and dialogues masquerade as each other. He said she said has been stripped from the prose. Quotation marks have been eliminated from Jaimy Gordon’s computer keys. The style is brilliant, earthy, and immediate, but can pose a challenge for some readers. I found it invigorating and genuine, as if I were there seeing the words in their eyes before they had time to move their lips.



From Wikipedia: In England, the Lord of Misrule — known in Scotland as the Abbot of Unreason and in France as the Prince des Sots — was an officer appointed by lot at Christmas to preside over the Feast of Fools. The Lord of Misrule was generally a peasant or sub-deacon appointed to be in charge of Christmas revelries, which often included drunkenness and wild partying, in the pagan tradition of Saturnalia. For the purposes of our story, he is a horse arriving in a whirlwind to throw a hoof through the hopes and dreams of a trio of fools.

This book first came to my attention when Entertainment Weekly published their map of the United States showing the books that best represent each state. This was the choice for West Virginia.

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[Chuck Lowry · Rating 2 out of 5]

I guess, honestly, I must have missed something. I read this book for two reasons, because it won the National Book Award and because it was about horseracing, in which I have had great interest at various times in my life. Ah, but the National Book Award--Walker Percy for The Moviegoer, Alice McDermott for Charming Billy, Saul Bellow for The Adventures of Augie March, Bernard Malamud for The Fixer. Add Lord of Misrule to these and it is an easy game of "Which Doesn't Belong and Why?"

It is possible, I suppose, that this was a book written for a different kind of reader, not for a reader like me. In that case, it could still be a good book. I didn't see in it the traits that would have made it a good book, but maybe others do. I do not see in it, because I think they do not exist, the traits that would make it a great book, the traits Faulkner would have called "the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice." I thought it was a narrow, almost idiosyncratic story, one whose failure to rise above the level of the commonplace made its technical components, which were certainly interesting, largely irrelevant.

I don't often write negative reviews, and I am certainly susceptible to correction.

[Bonnie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had a love-hate relationship with this book, or at least a like-hate relationship. I have to admit I'm surprised it won a National Book Award. That's the best there is out there? Ugh. It is everything stereotypically bad about the backside of a racetrack. Broken down claimers held together with glue (and a myriad of drugs, legal and illegal), gamblers fixing races, the organized crime mafioso lording it over the lesser humans at the track, a brutal breakdown during a race, and a woman in starry-eyed love with the horses under her care. I also cringed at the author's writing style. Not a single quotation mark in the whole book. I don't know why authors think writing out of the technical box makes their books special. I think it makes them hard to read and look sloppy like she used all this low class, backstretch slang as a way not to have to proofread her story. All this is why I hated the book. Some interesting characters, a fairly good plot, and the fact that I finally reached the point of no return, might as well finish the d@mn book now, is what kept me from hating it along the lines of Old Man and the Sea. But, no, I won't own the book and, no, I won't read another by this author.

[Daniel Clausen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The novel sit on the cracked counter of a Veloce chain coffee shop, crease-weary, and smelling of seven-year-old pages. The yellowing hadn't started, but that would come soon nough. One more coffee spill on her front page might make her a used up, spoiled thing, but she ain't no spoiled thing, and I be careful where I put my coffee. She's still got three or four good reads in her, yet. In older days, she would be read up 20 to 30 times before people lose interest. Then she'd sit on the shelf of some person, a trophy like.

The book young enough still to run a good literary race, but not so young to be on some hip millennial's reading list. Hip millennials ain't what you find around Book Off anyhow -- that the used bookstore's name. The millennials somewhere else. Coins come to them as gifts from heaven, not as something sacred to hold in your palm -- so sacred, make you want to wait for the right opportunity to use them. Like water in a desert, if cliches be okay for this book review.

Old horses and lost souls are the stuff of its word play. The book that is. Enough to get you in and then you find that there is more going on. Gangsters for those who are inclined. You can borrow some money. You can ride some money on a book, even this one. Down on her luck. Was 1800 yen in her day. Now, took her for 108 yen. That's Japanese money. I wonder if some old man named Natsume done had her first. I don't think I done had her last. There will be another owner, someone to ride a cool 100 yen on her. She be used, but not used up. No sir.

[jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is really, really, really good and you must read it. it may not be for everyone (what book is) but, man, this woman can write, and the story is fantastic. i love these characters. i love the horses. i love the low fog that keeps you from seeing your feet at 4 in the morning. i like how madness slowly creeps into a character and makes him both repellant and awesome. i like the tough women. i LOVE medicine ed. it's a small world but so, so rich. kind of like a family-run freak show, but with greedy men who end up dead in ditches.

[Kathi Defranc · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an enjoyable book to read for me, as I have been to small racetracks and lived on the backside, so knew all types of people as we all tried to ready our horses to bring home the money. The book is written beautifully, with descriptions of things and people that take me back. The folks on the backstretch live a tough life, you work hard to keep feeding your animals and yourself, it is a city unto itself. Rarely does anyone leave the racetrack, you eat in the track kitchen, sleep in a tack room, and all work hard every day.
The characters in this story are well-described and true to any on the track, I found the story interesting until the end

[Jessie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can see how this is the kind of thing people like - it's written in poetical dialect, and it focuses on a very oldfashioned, very specific subculture, and racing is the kind of space that brings people together, so you can have the old black groom, and the young jewish woman, and the crazy irishman.... And since it takes place in the fuzzy old 1970s, there were more regionalisms, no cellphones, less stuff.... I don't know. It was enjoyable enough in its own way, and maybe it's partly difficult for me that the 1970s are now in books what the 1930s sort of used to be - an olde time, before today, when everyone was down on their heels and the world seemed smaller and there was lots of violence, but that's ok because you fit in in your place. And that is sort of what this book is about - both living up to your identity and trying to create it, trying to escape it, and this kind of third tier rundown racetrack is a liminal, transgressive space where characters are both aware of their "place", and secure in it, to a certain extent, but also always trying to beat it - not to get the big win, but to get a win.

Story-wise, I am down with this, but style-wise, not my cup of tea. It does remind me a bit of last year's let the great world spin, although I cannot quite see what the connection is besides the 70s thing...

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Avg 3.24? Really? I absolutely loved the writing in this novel--it was fearless, raw, challenging. Perhaps that accounts for the absurdly low rating--clearly, Gordon doesn't care if people are turned off by her characters or content. But it's also not gratuitous; this is not a writer being flashy or going over the top. It's a refreshingly honest portrayal of a group of people at the bottom, all working, scheming, and dreaming to make it big in the world of horse-racing. But not Kentucky Derby-horse-racing--small-time races with big-time risks. Gordon's characters leap off the page, and, to her credit, she gives equal weight to each: the new couple Tommy and Margaret hoping to get in and get out before anyone notices, Margaret's betting uncle Two-Tie, the old groom, Medicine Ed, so close to retirement, but yet without the means. The novel is so well-balanced that everyone's story gets told, and, although sadness is a part of each person's life, the story is never crushed under the weight of it. It's a fantastic novel, written by a confident writer with her own unique, distinctive style.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lord of Misrule is the story of the trainers, grooms, jockeys and assorted hangers on at a seedy racetrack in West Virginia. I love horse racing and so I eagerly anticipated the novel, especially after learning that it had won the National Book Award.
Unfortunately, little about the story rang true. The story is told from the point of view of several characters, a technique that is quickly becoming hackneyed. One of the characters is Medicine Ed, the African American groom. Ed's narration is such a caricature that it borders on offensive. I'm not sure Gordon has ever talked to a black person in her life. Ed's character appears to have been constructed from reading Uncle Remus and watching episodes of Amos n Andy. Nearly every character is given a colorful nickname, of course, and the main character, Maggie, goes in for a little bondage just for the heck of it.
This is the kind of book that reeks of creative writing program, with full of artifice, lacking in humor and completely divorced from any actual life experience the author may have had.
From now on, I think I am going to have to read author biographies more carefully and pass on book written by anyone contaminated by an MFA.

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well this one really fizzles out. I stuck with it to the end, because I did enjoy the style. I was in the mood to be challenged by a book, and Lord of Misrule is challenging. No skimming! you have to read every word and some sentences are more like puzzles. Dialect and racing argot and convoluted syntax and weird nicknames ("It was not a harming goofer that Medicine Ed knew the making of.") And no quotation marks to help you follow the dialogue:
______
Medicine Ed laughed a little. I reckon that Grizzly nerved in all four feet, he said. I know he don't feel no pain.
Hell he is. Two's plenty, Deucey snapped.

(Translation: Medicine Ed laughed a little. "I reckon that Grizzly has had the nerve supplies cut to all four of his feet [surgery to numb a racehorse so he'll keep running despite injuries and trauma; unethical]," he said. "I know he don't feel no pain."

"Hell he has. Cutting the nerve supplies to two feet is plenty," Deucey snapped.)
______

BUT what is the reward for this effort? There's no character development, no epiphanies, no resolution of conflicts. Character motivations remain opaque. Nobody is changed by their experience, except the ones who get killed - I suppose that's a change. But not development.

Moral qualities line up predictably: the women are good, the poor black man is good, the white men are bad. (Well, one white man is a little bit good. But he used to be bad, when he was younger and had more energy.) This irritated me.

She basically set up her characters in the first section and assigned each one some distinguishing features and epithets: Maggie is "the curly-haired girl." Tommy is "the young fool" and dresses like a dandy. The Italian gangster rolls around in a car with tinted windows and wears hair grease and tight pants. He's bad. The Jewish gangster wears two ties (hence his name "Two-Tie") and dotes on his dog. Medicine Ed has a limp and thinks in dialect. Each character behaves in a consistent and predictable way: bad guys are bad in EVERY way and interaction, good guys are trustworthy and compassionate.

Characters' responses to each other seem almost automatic. They seem to trust or hate or love each other at first sight, and that response guides everything that happens between them... no first impression gets corrected, or refined, or complicated. The relationship that appears to be central just fades away, with no confrontation or even discussion.

If I'm generous, I'll say that the novel participates in the fatalism and mythic worldview of the racing milieu. Like everyone is a puppet of fate, and individual hopes, dreams, preferences, efforts, choices don't make much difference. There are epic aspects to the style that support that.
Or maybe it's trying to show the animalistic aspects of human nature - instinctive/physical responses rather than intellectual/psychological ones. An interesting experiment. But I want intellect and psychology and growth in a novel's characters.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like I almost know the writer too well to really respond impartially to this book; I had her as a teacher, once read almost all her works to prepare to interview her, etc. So, I'm at once really primed to like Jaimy's work, but also perversely in tune to how she sometimes repeats herself.

In this book, we get another version of the precocious female narrator, the same one we've seen in Bogeywoman, She Drove, and in one could argue, The Bend, The Lip, the Kid. It's a little awkward, too, given how closely this character Maggie physically aligns with the writer, though it's also true that the character of Maggie is unusual enough that it's not an entirely sentimental portrait, but it maybe too rosy to really hold our attention as the focal point of this novel.

There are other characters in this book, some of whom are rather sensitively portrayed-- Medicine Ed for one is really appealing, as is Two-Tie, two older characters who find themselves much closer to retirement than youth. But I think it's new territory for Jaimy, and I really like it.

Of course, it's not about character, or plot (which to me at least is a little too opaque here to be taken seriously). It's about the language-- Jaimy is known as a prose stylist, but unlike most people about whom that is said, I don't think that means every sentence Jaimy writes is especially elegant or balanced, just that every sentence is infected with a desire to move according to its own rhythm. There might, contra most prose stylists, be crude sentences here, but no boring ones.

The pleasure of Jaimy's prose is plumped by bringing in characters who speak in dialect, like Medicine Ed, which adds a richness and different flavor to the writing in those chapters he focalizes-- another way to look at it is that this adds an additional difficulty: this is a book of very dense writing.

I did really like it; I feel like the ending is a bit cursory, though maybe less so than usual. I do think the big final showdown is surprisingly composed for a work of literary fiction, esp. one that otherwise seems to casual about staging the action. But I'm less convinced that the thematic elements are really adequately worked out by that confrontation, or what follows.

Could I be any more vague? Probably. I mean, I'm not sure I really understand what brought Maggie to the track or why at the end she's left it. I don't really think that where Medicine Ed and the female trainer whose name I can't recall are left does justice to their particular storylines; I think the final treatment of Maggie's boyfriend is quite right, either, though he comes close to having a redemptive moment at the end. I feel a little like the design was lost, but knowing Jaimy, it's probably more accurate to say it was abandoned.

[Maya Lang · Rating 5 out of 5]

As Janet Maslin points out in her lovely review in the New York Times, the fact that this novel won the National Book Award makes Jaimy Gordon herself a kind of dark horse. It thrills me that this novel won, because it is the kind of challenging, inventive novel that doesn't sell many copies or get noticed by the big outlets (certainly, the Times had never taken notice of Gordon) because it is so *different.*

So, a quick word: this is not a novel for everyone. If I were teaching this novel, I would have to give a pep talk or two about how to persevere and the rewards of doing so. The language itself is a textured thing, its own lithe animal. At times Gordon risks losing the reader, but then there are flashes of brilliance in a description or in a sharp line of dialogue that make you sit up and see the world anew. Think Emily Dickinson on a horse track. You feel and smell the dust of the place and come away with a strangely precise sense of characters.

The thing that will pull you in and keep you going is the outcome of these races (the novel is structured around four) and the stakes involved for the motley crew of owners, groomers, and hands. Read for plot. Stay for language. You will find arresting, gorgeous prose at every turn.

[Irene · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel invites the reader into the lives of broken people in broken relationships populating the seedy backside of a small race track in West Virginia. Gordon masterfully captures the colloquial slang of the horse race scene in both the dialogues and internal monologues of the characters. In fact, it is so authentic that I was often confused about what was actually being communicated. Violent sex, murder, fraudulent schemes, this is the world of the characters that Gordon introduces the reader to and in which we find people that we are asked to understand, even if we can not love them. And, to this end he was successful; I never loved or approved of these figures, but I did come to appreciate their humanity.

[Bev · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon opens with "Inside the back gate of Indian Mound Downs, a hot-walking machine creaked round and round. In the judgment of Medicine Ed, walking a horse himself on the shedrow of Barn Z, the going-nowhere contraption must be the lost soul of this cheap racetrack where he been ended up at." That hot-walking machine provides the metaphor for the cheap claiming race track at the rock-bottom end of the sport of kings.

Gordon's National Book Award winner is all about the world of the cheap race, down-on-their-luck trainers, jockeys and owners, and the horses that are literally on their last legs. Tracks like this are where racing folk go when they have nowhere else to go. Into this world comes horseman Tommy Hansel. He has a plan to change his luck and get him and his horses back into racing as a money-maker. His idea is to bring four unknown horses into Indian Mound Downs, have them run in the cheap claiming races at long odds, cash his bets, and "get out fast" before anyone notices what he's done. However, in a world that also includes loan sharks, small-time gangsters, and savvy former trainers, things don't always go as planned. Part of Hansel's luck depends on his girlfriend, Maggie--but even he doesn't foresee the way her luck will run.

This is an interesting book. I noticed several blog reviews which mentioned the dialect and how difficult it was to get into the book because of it. The dialect didn't really give me trouble--although I do find it a bit inconsistent at times. What I found most difficult was getting used to the rhythm of the writing itself. It took a while before I got the feel of it. There would be long almost-lyrical passages of gorgeous writing and then, all of sudden, nothing. It reminded me of the first races of two of the horses, Mahdi and Little Spinoza. Each horse had a beautiful run at the start of their race. Mahdi running like no one knew he could and then all of a sudden getting distracted, slowing up, and getting beaten at the finish. Little Spinoza taking off like a shot, running himself out, and just quitting. The break in the continuity of the writing mirrored those races--which made me wonder if this was deliberate. Was Gordon trying to give us the feel of a failed race in her very writing style? It certainly seemed so.

One portion of the book that disturbed me--the idea that the key to pleasure is pain. The relationship between Maggie and Tommy is built on this concept and Tommy absolutely believes that this is the key that "unlocks" all women. And there is a carry-over to the horses. Many of the horses running in these races are in pain somewhere--in their feet, in their legs, sometimes in their apparent fear of the racing itself. But they are represented as breaking through the pain (or using the pain) to reach the pleasure of the run--particularly Lord of Misrule in the final race.

Gordon's use of imagery and metaphor is a bit uneven--at times she's dead-on with description ("his dapples came up like god's golden fingerprints") but then she can turn around and use one like this: "Natalie, the New Rochelle chainstore divorcee, with her big pink open mouth like a toilet seat." And I definitely wish an editor had convinced her to use punctuation for her dialogue (no quote marks, ever). But overall, a captivating book--particularly once I found the rhythm in the writing. The story is compelling and I found myself rooting for the horses and even more for Maggie. Three and 3/4 stars--verging on four, but not quite.

[MarkB · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an unusual novel!

I found Lord of Misrule a difficult read. It is not a "page turner that you can not wait to get back to". Ms. Gordon uses a staccato cadence and pacing which never settles into a comfortable flow. There are several deep dialects that never become familiar. You are not always sure who is speaking to whom, even occasionally whether human is speaking to human or to an animal.

This is not a book about horse racing. It is a book about hardscrabble people in a hardscrabble place trying to get from one day to the next. Yes, the race track is the setting and framework, but the story is one of survival, hope and despair. Luck is always around the next corner, but never really at hand.

I never felt that the characters were vivid, they were always a bit hazy and distant. I felt that I was looking into a shadow or a through a layer of film. The narrative is also sketchy and jumpy throughout, almost more lyrical poetry than prose at times.

This is all certainly intentional and not necessarily a bad thing, just disconcerting at times. Lord of Misrule simply requires a good deal from the reader and will not resonate with everyone.

Finally, there are several passages where the imagery suddenly devolves into vulgarity which many readers may find extreme.

[Jim · Rating 1 out of 5]

There's a reason for using certain styles, like dialog with quotes, he said & she said. This is all mixed up with some sentences being thoughts while others are apparently supposed to be dialog. Seems like the author knows what he/she is talking about, but it's just too much work trying to read this.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most of us, when we think of horse racing, conjure up a mint-juleps-and-roses vision of the Kentucky Derby or perhaps, Churchill Downs, attended by jewel-studded rich folk dressed up in their finery with cash to burn.

But at the rock-bottom end of the sport, horse racing is a whole other world – a world inhabited by down-on-their-luck trainers and jockeys, loan sharks and crooks, gyps and hotwalkers. This is the world Jaimy Gordon takes on – Indian Mound Downs, where the horses are mostly aging, drugged, or lame and the trainers are as crooked and cynical as they come.

Into this world steps Maggie, a young, college-educated frizzly-haired, naïve girl who has hitched her wagon to her boyfriend Tommy’s star – a “young fool” with a scheme to rescue his failing stable. He intends to ship four down-and-out horses there, race them at long odds, take the money and run before anyone knows what’s happened. But Maggie and Tommy don’t really have a clue what they’re up against – jaded and desperate men for whom horses mean nothing and people mean even less.

Jaimy Gordon knows her way around this world and she certainly knows her horses. Each of the four parts of the book is centered on an individual horse – Mr. Boll Weevil, Little Spinoza, Pelter, and the “devil horse” Lord of Misrule. These are horses filled with personality, treading their way into the flying mud with chopping legs and nostrils cavernous and flaring, neurotic as all hell, almost but not quite ready to live up to their potential. The descriptions of the horses and the races they enter and the conditions they endure are among the finest you’re ever likely to read.

Ms. Gordon’s idiosyncratic people are slightly less developed, mainly because they are down-and-out and trapped. Some of them shine: Medicine Ed, for example, who dispenses drugs to the horses is beautifully depicted and Maggie – and her cruel awakening – is also detailed with fine strokes. So is Two-Tie, Maggie’s gangster uncle who strives to be her protector. Others – including Tommy -- are less so.

These lowlifes speak in their own racetrack patois (and it helps to know at least be open to learning this patois); they are limited and restricted, unable to survive without the dust and the road of the racetrack. It’s difficult to even think of them racetrack hanger-ons existing in the outside world -- perhaps the one glaring fault of the novel. The characters become secondary to the world they live in, bit players who strut and fret their hour on stage when ultimately, they are mostly doomed.

Tommy reflects: “Now it all falls into place. Before, you thought you knew, and felt your way along blindly. And though this world is a black tunnel of love where the gods admonished you to search without rest for your lost twin, it’s also haired all over with false pointers, evil instructions, lost-forever dead-ends.”

There is a propulsive energy to Lord of Misrule, a voice that’s strong and original, and an intimate knowledge that’s in turn, poignant, comic, heartbreaking, and suspenseful. The surprise winner of the National Book Award this year, Lord of Misrule brings the reader

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Winner of the National Book Award but for the life of me I can't figure out why. There are good things about it and Gordon writes some very vivid images, but the book was uneven at best. It is the early 70's at a seedy horse track in West Virginia. There are mafia types fixing races and beating up the locals. The characters are sketchy in both senses of the word. Sometimes dramatic things are happening to them without enough explanation. The style is odd. There are multiple narrators and it's hard to follow the rather loose plot. Most characters have chapters written in 3rd person but one is written in 2nd. Why? I found it disconcerting although maybe there was some literary reason for it. The horses as characters worked pretty well. There was a dark Vs light, good Vs. evil, god vs satan thing going on and it worked quite well. Gordon knows her subject and writes some great (albeit sometimes overworked) images. It can easily slip into pulp fiction territory. The book did grab me a bit about halfway through and I loved the character of Maggie who seemed used up and lovely at the same time. (Much like her horse) National Velvet it ain't! These characters are hard core and rough.

What really got old for me? The use of dialects was so overdone (Sadday=Saturday) and I wanted to scream, "When writing dialogue, quotation marks are NOT optional."

[Joe Drape · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. This is the best book I've read in a long time, finished it in one sitting. It also is quite rightfully a finalist for the National Book Award. It's true literature. Anyone who knows anything about horse racing will be captivated as Gordon perfectly evokes the beauty and grit as well as the desperation and hope of racetrackers who inhabit a down and out track in West Virginia. There's a gentlemanly loan shark, a broken down groom, a crazy trainer, a crooked one and a head strong girl. Some of them love their broken down horses, others could care less about them. All of them live for the thrill of the betting coup and a cashed ticket. You breath the red dust and hear the leaky roofs of horse racing's grits-and-hard-toast-circuit as it is beautifully written. Ultimately, Gordon said in an interview, Lord of Misrule is about "trying to figure out what the shape of your luck on Earth is and, one way or another, come to terms with that. It’s very much about courting that message from the gods that you were destined for something special, and most of the characters of the book have to settle for what they get.” The last line of the book is beautiful and haunting.

[Joan Colby · Rating 5 out of 5]

. I recognized I was in the presence of a fine talent when early on I encountered this description: “He was an unhealthy looking man of a drained cement color.” And of course, I fell for what Hemingway would call “the true gen” of the racetrack setting and characters. One is inclined to think Gordon must have spent years on the backside, but the probability is that, as an English professor, she relied on research. I’d love to know though, as the verisimilitude of “Lord of Misrule” is remarkable. She gets away with striking and poetic phrases without disturbing the narrative, itself quite a feat. A caveat: the plot premise: an out-of-towner arrives with a stable of unknown horses to enter in claiming races with the notion of picking up a gambling score, is not only hackneyed but implausible as such a scheme is well-known to horsemen worldwide. I like that Gordon (who is older than I would have thought) does not condescend to the reader by altering racing lingo or explaining it. Yet, this may however, limit her readership. She deserves the National Book Award that this volume garnered for her.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a victim of inflated expectations and anticipation. I wanted to like it; I wanted to love it. Wanted to love it so much that I put off reading it for months, which stretched into years. I wanted this book to complete a literary Triple Crown, the fictional leg of an Equine Trilogy that included the bio /history "Seabiscuit," by Laura Hillenbrand, and the memoir
Laughing in the Hillsby Bill Barich. I wanted Secretariat winning the Belmont by 30 lengths and got a raw, gutsy 'mudder' winning a no-name race by a half length on a sloppy track. Lots of splashy style that smelled and tasted like the real thing but splattered the goggles so much I had trouble seeing the horse's rump right in front of me, much less the finish line. I got frustrated, impatient -- I'm a lazy jock, I admit, overweight, stone hands, no feel for a stubborn, cranky, proud horse when I'm not in the mood -- and wanted to pull up, pretend he had a cracked hoof or something, but the horse wanted to run, so I stayed on for the ride. He wore me out, almost threw me coming down the stretch. Though I admired his heart, he was no immortal. Unlike Achilles' divine steeds weeping over Patroclus' corpse, neither of us shed a tear, either celebratory or funereal afterwards. He pranced himself back to his stall without so much as a knicker or tail-switch in my direction, and that was fine. I respected his independence, his conviction, his commitment to his style, but I would not ride him again if given the chance. Instead, I reread Carson McCuller's brilliant short story, "The Jockey," and realized that the Trilogy was already a Triple Crown-winner. (Hemingway's "My Old Man" will probably kick a few grooms and nip an exercise rider or two when he finds out he came in second, but I'll make it up to him later with a feedbag spiked with sour mash.)

[Sara Warner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wildly great novel. Jaimy Gordon creates the seedy and dangerous life of the dregs of the horse racing world...claiming races, broken down horses and people struggling to hang on to their last square inch of power. Gordon is a magician with language. She envelopes this weird and grittily exotic world in a fog of desire, cruelty, love and nobility, never letting up on her breakneck race to save what matters--if only we can figure out what that is. She is a story-teller extraordinaire, approaching her narrative with a fearlessness rare in contemporary authors. You might love this novel as much as anything you've ever read, but it ain't for the cozy crowd.

[Amber Scaife · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I recognize that there are things to admire about this book (the writing shines in a few places, and the characters are well-crafted), I can't say that I enjoyed it. Or even particularly liked it. Because there are also things here that I demonstrably didn't enjoy: the sex scenes were icky (thankfully there were only a couple), and the racetrack details were beyond my ken. I admit that this last fault is my own, since I know very close to nothing about horse racing, although I suppose a case could be made that the book should be readable to those outside track life. Despite all this, though, the basic storyline - which took me a good 3/4 of the book to suss out - pulled me in on the home stretch (and do apologize for the word choice there). So, a mixed bag this one, for me, at least.

[Rachel Ludwig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule is an excellent and unique read. The setting is Indian Mound Downs, a rundown racetrack in West Virginia. There are four main characters: Tommy Hansel and Maggie Koderer who hope of winning big and moving on to the next track; Medicine Ed, the old groom who dreams of winning enough to retire to Florida; and the loan shark and loner, Two-Tie, who is growing increasingly tired of the racetrack game. Gordon constructs these characters as well as a myriad of other characters skillfully. I drew many similarities between the main characters and the four primary horses. They seemed to be reflections of one another. I liked that she used the horses as a means for character development. The characters’ pasts are very briefly covered, but I felt that this worked really well for the story because it seemed that all the characters wanted to forget their past and look to the future. The POV is an alternating close third person on the main characters except for the chapters which focus on Tommy which are in second person perspective. The alternating POV gives the reader a three dimensional look at the characters by showing what they think as well as how others see them. Often chapters will go back and show a different character’s reaction to the same event.
Gordon really captures life on the racetrack and immerses the reader in this world. The language, superstitions, gambling, gangsters, and desperation were very believable. It is clear she is knowledgeable on this subject. Description is prevalent throughout this book which is a blessing to readers who are not familiar with the racetrack or West Virginia. I must warn, however, since it is written primarily in the vernacular of a West Virginian racetrack and since Gordon does not define some of the slang and racing terms, the wording may throw the reader for a loop at first. However, I found that after I became familiar with the different narrative voices and characters, it was easy to understand the language.
Lord of Misrule is about four people trying to make it big at a second rate racetrack, but there seems to be several deeper themes throughout this book: finding a home, forging relationships, breaking ties, and coming to terms with death. The subject and setting lent themselves to these themes marvelously. Horseracing could tie people together or tear them apart depending simply on what side of a bet one found oneself. The racetrack could become a home or a stop on the long road to finding one. The racetrack also can symbolize life and death. The people in this story are dependent on it to survive but it is also the place of death for unlucky horses and people alike. I really liked how Gordon tied the plot, setting, and character development so closely together. Everything seemed to fit perfectly.
Though Lord of Misrule is full of tragedy, it seemed humorous and somehow uplifting at the same time. Jaimy Gordon did such an excellent job creating her characters (horses included) that it seems fitting to rejoice for their successes and mourn their deaths. I really liked this book and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in the subject of horseracing as well as to those who are not.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a reason Lord of Misrule won the National Book Award. Gordon expertly employees four separate third-person narrators (well, one is actually second-person) throughout the entire book. Each chapter dives into a different characters head and never once does the reader feel at a loss for who is the focus.

Every character in this book is trying to stack the odds in their favor to either simply survive in or walk away very rich from the horse racing world. The truth is that they are all susceptible to what feels like a perpetual cycle of many losses with an occasional win so long as they remain within the confines of the racing world—which can be seen as a metaphor for human existence in the world at large. Gordon’s characters know or learn the ins and outs of the racing world, for better or worse, and they do their best to continue to put a roof of their own over their heads (Medicine Ed), keep a horse in their stall (Duecey), protect their family (Two-Tie), discover who they are (Maggie).

This book is also about the fallacy of the Cinderella story. Each person who makes any kind of gain, legitimate or otherwise, does so through hard work or very dirty dealings, which often lead to unpleasant consequences. There is nothing pretty about the workings of this horse race world, even some of the horses themselves have been run ragged. Yet, everyone loves a Cinderella story, even if they have to ignore a few shady details to believe it.

In the end, Maggie discovers that she is stronger and more capable of handling life than she ever knew herself to be before coming to Indian Mound Downs. She no longer feels she was there simply to take care of Tommy Hansel and his horses; she was there for herself as much as for any man or any animal.

The language in this book is divine. Even in the early stages of the book when I was trying to orient myself and when the action was slow, the language kept me reading. The first two chapters are great, but it was as if Gordon was purposefully keeping us in the gate when all we wanted to do was burst out and get on with the race.

I’m glad she finally opened the gate because the story really picks up. While the whole book is superb, Chapter 27 is some of the best reading I have ever had the privilege of experiencing. I went over it at least twice and plan on reading it again. In that chapter, specifically, Gordon carries the reader on her back as if she were a seasoned thoroughbred; the reader is never distracted or thrown off by a single word. The entire book is drenched in images and phrases that had me breaking out the highlighter and rereading pages for pure enjoyment’s sake.

For me as a writer, the greatest strength of all, regarding Lord of Misrule, is that every time I put it down, I wanted to write.

[David Granger · Rating 5 out of 5]

First, I have to confess to a bias: I love horse racing! I love the lore and I love watching those beautiful animals run for the roses, the black-eyed susans, whatever. And I know a little about the sport. I know what a "claimer" is and I also knew, coming into this book, that horse-racing --- particularly at the smaller, lesser-known tracks --- has its ugly underbelly.

So, with that disclaimer out of the way, I loved Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon. I have to admit to being thrown a bit at the beginning by Gordon's use of dialect (especially with the character Medicine Ed), but once I grew used to it, understanding it became natural. In the end, I think the dialect added much to the reader's understanding of the character and was essential to the book's success.

Lord of Misrule offers a glimpse at the aforementioned underbelly of horse racing at a fictional race track in West Virginia (Or is it fictional? One wonders if it's based on Mountaineer Downs.). It's the story of those characters that depend on that underbelly for their livelihoods. And it is the story of the desperate greed that manifests itself in the struggle among those at the sport's bottom to "succeed" --- whatever that means in the squalid world that Gordon creates.

This book really hit the mark for me, but, again, maybe it's due to the biases I had coming in. Still, Gordon's talent is undeniable. I just hope that her unblinking look at the ugly side of this industry helps bring about improvements and not the end of a proud sport through which many of the most honest (and, yes, I am certain that a lot of shenanigans, like those portrayed in the book, actually occur in the industry), hard-working Americans make their living.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lord of Misrule is a really good book, but I almost didn’t realize it. I read it more out of a sense of hometown pride—Hey, someone who teaches in Kalamazoo, Michigan won the National Book Award!—than any real knowledge of or interest in the book.
And at first I was stumped: Gordon takes us into a world that seems so foreign and gritty—the world of horse racing—and leaves us there to fend for ourselves. I know nothing about horse racing and have never been interested in it, and Gordon doesn’t over-explain. The book opens with a hot-walking machine, and I’m still not even sure what this is. Even the book’s epigraph, an excerpt from Ainslie’s Complete Guide to Thoroughbred Racing, meant (I think) to help clarify certain elements of horse racing for us, had me confused. I had to keep going back to reread it to make sure I understand the plot elements that hinged on this particular bit of horse-racing.
Reading the book at first really felt like work. And then suddenly it didn’t. Once I got used to the dialect of certain characters (“Sadday” for “Saturday” and other invented spellings) and the heavy racing vernacular, I was hooked.
The characters could, in less sure hands, be mere caricatures of a type—the Black medicine-man groom, the innocent young girl who gets caught in the seedy world of the track, and the young handsome, heroic lead; but Gordon pushes through these flat types: Her medicine-man isn’t sure of his own powers; the girl, though innocent to horse racing, is sharp enough to understand the world she’s in, and the handsome hero is off-kilter and dangerous. None of these characters’ flaws specifically lead to their undoing, and the novel doesn’t follow any sort of predicable trajectory. Instead the story is unpredictable while still being believable. It’s brash and big in its style yet subtle and realistic in its portrayal of the world, not just the horse-racing world, but the world that the rest of us know.

[Kat Hagedorn · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://tinyurl.com/684lvv6

Absolutely, I would title my book after the best horse name in the biz. (Or at least the best horse name in this book.) I think "Lord of Misrule" trumps "Pelter," "Little Spinoza," and "Little Boll Weevil" (although that last one is fairly awesome). Strangely, though, this book isn't really about horses. It's about how we've transformed horses into a substrata of American culture, and all the wonderful and scuzzy things that come from having done that.

I'm sure the book has deeper meanings than that, but the way it reads allows you to simply go with the flow and enjoy the power that Ms. Gordon has -- how she plays with sentence structure, how she develops sympathy for characters lacking in social skills or moral bases, how she can so easily describe various horse personalities... Because it's a strange kind of power, and it makes it a bit of a loopy read. The first 50 pages are going to throw you a bit: who's talking to who? why are people called several different things, meaning I have to conflate those in my head as I'm reading? where in the world is this strange place, anyway?

Don't let it dissuade you from keeping on. That kind of power means that you don't have to pay attention to every little detail on the page. As one of my book club members said in response to books like this: it's like Shakespeare, you just let it wash over you. This book is perhaps not quite that... well... dramatic, but it's definitely emblematic of this type of writing.

I really loved my time at a real horse track.

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to be honest, the only reason I picked this book up was because the author, Jaimy Gordon, was going to be giving a lecture in town. I didn't care about small-stakes horse racing, and I'm always wary of award winners. As soon as I finished the second chapter, though, I was hooked, and the novel kept getting better from there. Gordon crafts a collection of excellent characters, from the young and naive Maggie, to the veteran Medicine Ed (whose dialect is pitch perfect and never difficult to read). The world of this particular horse track is well crafted, and the reader understands the poor racers and petty mobsters who run the place, almost like they'd always known them. The prose is beautiful and natural. Even descriptions of the most mundane actions read like poetry. Most importantly, though, by the end of the book I cared about the people, about the horses, and about an old dog named Elizabeth. While it's not uncommon for me to like people, and while I have a weak spot for dogs, I don't have any special affinity for horses, except the one created here in Gordon's novel.

[Mainon · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book started off fantastic -- the imagery was striking, the characters were interesting, and the occasional use of dialect wasn't too intrusive.

About halfway through the book, though, I started losing my handle on the book. I found myself having trouble remembering which horse was which, and what connected the various characters to which horses. For obvious reasons, that made the book much less enjoyable. By the end, I was even a little unsure that I understood why people were doing what they were doing anymore.

It's a shame -- I really wanted to like this book, but all my appreciation for the setting and the horse-racing expertise had ebbed away by the end of the book.

One other note: there are a handful of sex scenes scattered throughout the book, somewhat graphic, but mostly just disturbingly different in tone from the rest of the book. They're dark and overly poetic, almost mystical, and I seem to recall them being written in the second person, which might be partly responsible for their disturbing nature.