Aloma lived in this dark place, a dark country in a dark state, and it pressed on her ceaselessly as a girl until she finally realized in a moment of prescience that someday adulthood would come with its great shuddering release and she would be free. Then she would leave and find a riseless place where nothing impeded the progress of the sun from the moment it rose in the east until it died out easily, dismissed into the west. That was what she wanted. That more than family, that more than friendship, that more than love. Just the kind of day that couldn’t be recalled into premature darkness by the land.
Everything comes from everything and nothing escapes commonality. I am building a house already built, you are bearing a child already born. Everything comes from everything: a single cell out of another single cell; the cherry tree blossoms from the boughs; the hunter's aim from his arm; the rivers from tributaries from streams from falls from springs from wells; the Christ thorns out of the honey locust; a word from an ancient word, this book from many books; the tiny black bears out of their durable mothers tumbling from dark lairs; eightieth-generation wild crab abloom again and again and again; your hand out of your father's; firstborn out of firstborn out of firstborn out of; the weeping willows and the heart leaf, the Carolina, the silky, the upland, the sandbar willows; every tart berry; our work, which disappears; our mothers' whispers, which disappear; every Thoroughbred; every violet; every kindling twig, bone out of bone; also the heat lightborne, the pollen airborne, the rabbits soft and crickets all angles and the glossy snakes from their slithering, inexhaustible mothers, freshly terrible. When you die, you will contribute your bones like alms. More and more is the only law.
“Like her real subject, then, Morgan’s true influences lie far afield of horses. There is the whale, for one.“The Sport of Kings” is indebted to “Moby-Dick,” and shares many of its obsessions: with origins, identity, class, status, work, the problem of evil, and the special dispensation, if any, of America. Faulkner is here, too—especially “Light in August,” a novel that begins, as “The Sport of Kings” ends, with a house burning down. Harriet Beecher Stowe gets a nod, although a chilly one: the scene where the runaway slave Abby dies while attempting to cross the Ohio River is a pointed revision of Eliza’s crossing in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Mark Twain shows up as a leavening influence, as when a slave takes revenge on a vicious overseer by packing his pipe with gunpowder. (The most Twainian part is that he doesn’t die. He just departs to another county to recover.) And then there is the entire shelf of literature that Morgan ransacked to create Reuben, her epic imp, who rides not only the horse but the story itself to its dramatic ending. He is Caliban, Chaos, Br’er Rabbit, John Kennedy Toole’s Ignatius J. Reilly, Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden. (Reuben also has Shakespeare to spare, down to the darkly silly ditties he sometimes sings: “I jumped in the seat and gave a little yell; the horses ran away, broke the wagon all to hell; sugar in the gourd and honey in the horn, never been so screwed since the day I was b— Allmon, as I live and breathe!”)”
- Kathryn Schulz, “Track Changes,” The New Yorker (9 May 2016)
Reading The Bailey’s Shortlist #4 - The Sport Of Kings by C.E. Morgan
Hellsmouth, a wilful thoroughbred filly, has the legacy of a family riding on her.
The Forges: one of the oldest and proudest families in Kentucky; descended from the first settlers to brave the Wilderness Road; as mythic as the history of the South itself – and now, first-time horse breeders.
Through an act of naked ambition, Henry Forge is attempting to blaze this new path on the family's crop farm. His daughter, Henrietta, becomes his partner in the endeavour but has desires of her own. When Allmon Shaughnessy, an African American man fresh from prison, comes to work in the stables, the ugliness of the farm's history rears its head. Together through sheer will, the three stubbornly try to create a new future – one that isn't determined by Kentucky's bloody past – while they mould Hellsmouth into a champion.
I do not know what to think of this book, and that’s a problem when you’ve committed to reading 500 pages.
As the blurb will tell you, this is a story about a family grappling with legacy, history, and futures in twentieth century America. It’s a story about chasing the American dream, about slavery and race, the remnants of war and modern day justice. It’s character-driven and disquieting, oddly compelling even when you want to look away. It’s about love and hate and rage and fear and terror and sadness and where we find joy, and how to savour that joy, and what to do when that joy disappears. It’s a novel lined with grief and pain and the many (terrible) ways to cope with it. It’s a history in the purest sense – his story. It’s a tale of a man’s actions and the consequences that result, of the key figures in his life (some chosen, others imposed) and the impact they have.
It is also filled with incredibly flowery prose which is fine except for the instances where it’ too much. Oddly enough, the flowery prose makes this novel a very cold one – everything is so removed and it’s difficult to sympathise, let alone empathise with any of the characters. This novel could have been about a third of the length and it wouldn’t have suffered for it, particularly as the prose doesn’t do much in the way of worldbuilding. It’s just there as painfully tortured monologuing that was a struggle to actually concentrate on.
And then there’s the story itself, which at times is excellent (Allmon’s tale in particular is the one I wish we had 500 more pages of, and I really enjoyed having a character as unreadable as Henrietta) except for where it isn’t – Henry’s story was difficult to get through, and not simply because of the subject matter. Morgan’s attention to detail regarding horse racing is incredible and I’d gladly read more of it, but again it’s all window dressing for the inner lives of these very difficult characters and I didn’t feel as though I connected with, or learned anything, about them. The beats were all well-worn and there was nothing new here, as though we’ve read this story many times before.
And that’s the thing – we have. The horse racing element is certainly a twist but it falls a sad second behind these infuriating people and the novel doesn’t do enough work to make the connections with those characters stick. I just didn’t care enough about them to want to make it all the way through. Stories like this live or die by the strength of the characterisation and the way the story is told. The tale doesn’t need to be new, but it needs to be interesting. The only interesting things I found were the technical elements. It certainly wasn’t the people or the plot.
In honesty, I’m not sure I would have finished this if it hadn’t been on the list – something about the whole enterprise was a painful, painful slog. The payoff is kind of worth it, and there’s something to be said about this depiction of The South which lines up with the miles of dusty plains and grazing cows and rusted signs in front of lone structures jutting up from the ground. One of the characters in the novel notes wryly that the North may think itself beyond racism, but they are not the ones to live in places where white-skinned and black-skinned Americans operate side by side. This novel does a good job of placing itself in the world of the South, but again, it’s a backdrop for these characters and the connection between who these people are and the environment they’re a part of doesn’t fit together. The lead characters have a strange sense of pride in their distance from the rest of the world – an interesting concept, but it would have been much more interesting to be able to get a better sense of that disconnect, rather than be told about it and then moving on.
After finishing this novel I went looking for reviews, because sometimes it is easier to make sense of your own thoughts when you know what others are saying. Many of the reviews I saw were filled with praise, but there were certainly a few that raised some of the issues I had with this book. Technically this book is good, if overwritten. I just don’t think it’s a very good novel.
So you take a book, put it on the Baileys longlist, then put it for sale on Book Outlet, then put it on the Baileys shortlist, then make it a finalist for the Pulitzer, and then what happens? It gets read. Immediately.
In Austin, Texas, three writers have emerged from a ceremony with fresh laurels in hand: C.E. Morgan, Jason Reynolds and Susan Faludi have won Kirkus Prizes this year — for fiction, young readers' literature and nonfiction, respectively. The prize, awarded by the literary publication Kirkus Reviews, doles out $50,000 apiece along with the honors in each category.
Jason Reynolds, C.E. Morgan And Susan Faludi Win 2016 Kirkus Prize
And better, far better, than a roving desire that searched the horizon for new locations in which to discover an easier love, as if love—mixed and diluted with laziness— could still be love.
