The Sport of Kings

The Sport of Kings does not have a lick of wimpy writing in it. Instead, it’s the kind of prose that hooks two fingers in your nostrils and drags you through it:

In the fifth month Henry’s terror grows steadily in the womb of his mind. What if the Blood Horse is born of Soured Milk? What if there exists no vestige of divinity at all but only a satyr, that beast of horsetail, cloven hoof, and black pugnacious eye? It’s all her fault — seductress! She was too voluptuous, too hot-blooded and luxuriant. She lay in the undulatory grasses under green, fireworking trees, drunk on the liquor of Nature when the other pricked her lip and butterflied her and split the red carbuncle. See how the ordered marvels have been made vulgar! Now the invasive little goat floats in the tendrils of his sodden horse’s tail; he is swilling her dark wine, strangely robust and grinning, that swarthy little fiend already stroking himself erect, good for nothing and unfit for work, a mother’s trouble and Nature’s excess, the child of the a warmongering Orangutan and a woman, Simia satyrus. The bestiaries will designate him an indolent cline.

That’s just Henry Forge, a horse breeder and scion of an old, wealthy Kentucky family,  thinking about his daughter’s pregnancy. This is an extreme paragraph — all the writing is not quite so florid — but it does give a good sense of the intensity of C. E. Morgan’s prose and the way she  lashes together rich vocabulary and syntax to tell the story and layer and sculpt her themes.

I romped through this novel, initially caught up in the language. It’s about a topic and place — horse breeding/racing in Kentucky — that I know very little about. The book starts with the establishment of the Forge family in Kentucky and the many generations of Forges that gets us to Henry and his only child, Henrietta. Henry defies his ancestors by turning their noble plantation into a world-class horse breeding facility.  His daughter turns his family’s long line of privilege on its white, racist head by hiring a formerly incarcerated black groom (with his own long back story) that she gets up to all kinds of business with in the horse barn.

Splitting each chapter of storytelling are “Interlude” chapters where the writer waxes wild about her themes: race, breeding, genetics, blood lines, primogeniture, in horseflesh and human flesh. It was altogether clear that Morgan was playing with the ideas of breeding horses and breeding humans and how miscegenation and racism factored into both the business and the personal.

Looking at them all raising glasses to her munificent grandfather, her ambitious father — panegyrics for the living and the dead. The bourbon Henrietta was drinking was florid and complex, but she tasted only confusion. She had lain under Allmon just this afternoon, curing with want and wanting his need. She was in love, but maybe she was also hopelessly naive. She blinked. Did she actually think that love offered some kind of escape? There is kingdom, class, order, family, genus, species. You could step out of your heels, walk backward down the hall, recede from their collective gaze, but you could never escape the category of your birth and all the morphological categories which preceded it.

Where Morgan grabbed me with her writing style, she lost me with her storytelling. I don’t want to give too much away, but I found Henrietta’s declared love for her groom utterly ridiculous–lust, yes, love, no. Everything about her character was set up to make such a declaration highly improbable (though maybe the preceding quote suggests such awareness). Also, Allmon, the black groom and her lover, was a complex character that I didn’t think Morgan had a good hold of on many levels — his emotions, ambitions, and motivations. I almost stopped reading at the point where Allmon has an emotional breakdown in the horse barn — it really seemed cheesy to me. I wish her storytelling were on par with her wordsmithing, then this book would have been the humdinger it promised.

Despite my uneasiness with the storytelling, I did read all the way to the end. I loved her language and even enjoyed the themes, heavy-handed as they were at times. Anybody else read this? What did you think of the probability of Henrietta and Allmon’s relationship being true love? Did you think that a certain aspect (ahem…) of Henrietta and Henry’s relationship seemed to be added in as an afterthought?

A short update to say that I was just notified that this is my 100th post. Huzzah!

3/5
personal copy

Pulitzer 1965: The Keepers of the House

I’d say that 1965 was a very good year for the Pulitzer prize in literature. It was awarded to Shirley Ann Grau for The Keepers of the House,  a morally complex novel about racism, family, and gender set in the deep south.

Abigail Howland is the seventh generation heir to the Howland family estate in rural Alabama. Her great-great-great-great grandfather established the farm in 1815, and by the time Abigail inherits from her grandfather, William, the Howlands are deeply respected members of the state and county, not in the least because they own most of it.

William’s story is fascinating — his wife dies and he lives alone until he meets a young black woman, Margaret, who becomes his housekeeper and also bears him five children. Everybody in the town/county seem to know about his children, but as has been done for generations, they turn a blind eye to his “woods colts.” The children, who are so light-skinned they can pass for white, are sent off to boarding schools at puberty, never to return. The eldest, Robert, is the same age as William’s white granddaughter, Abigail.

The Underground Railroad

Much has been made about the train in The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, specifically that it’s an actual train and not a metaphorical one that people ride to escape slavery.  Because of all this commentary, I thought, going into the book, that Cora, the escaped slave protagonist of the novel, would spend more time riding the rails than she actually does.. Cora rides the train a few times, but stops for long spells between stations, in different states, and experiences different states of freedom and enslavement.

The most fantastic thing about the train is its unpredictability. It doesn’t follow a regular schedule, and the riders can never be sure where they will arrive next. Each stop is in a different state, and each state has its own treatment of the slave. If the plantation life that Cora flees is one that we reader might recognize as familiar– slave cabins, deprivation, field work, mercurial and cruel masters — each stop on Cora’s journey takes us into less familiar literary narratives about slavery and racial injustice. At one stop, Cora is seemingly treated as a respected member of society, until she realizes that blacks are the subjects of a systematic sterility program.  At another stop, blacks are being lynched out of existence  and so she is hidden in the false ceiling of an attic for months (shades of Anne Frank?). At another stop, she is given a job (a job!) working in a museum, but it turns out she is merely a live figure in a diorama about slave life. The white people watch her from outside the glass like an animal in a cage. It’s just weird and disturbing. All the while, Cora is being chased by a slave catcher named Ridgeway, who eventually does catch up with her. But I won’t tell anymore…

Four Shorties

HHhH by Laurent Binet

Told in a distinctly postmodern style, the novel explores the assassination of Reinhart Heydrich, the Blond Beast of the Third Reich and mastermind of the Final Solution, by two Czech men. I’d never heard of Heydrich, but then again, I am not encyclopedic on Nazis or WWII FAQs in general. Still, after completing this book, it seems that Heydrich should be at least as well-known as Himmler or Goring (the title stands for the phrase, in German, Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich).

Time Reading Program: Cross Creek

Cover art front and back by Jim Jonson. Jonson was a noted illustrator of mostly athletes in action. His work was published in Sports Illustrated, Time Life Books, Ski, and others.

It was difficult to decide which one, of my current 57 Time Reading Program Special Edition books, to start reading first. Somehow my finger landed on Cross Creek by Marjoire Kinnan Rawlings, and I gently pried the cover open about 30 degrees (the covers are so stiff that it is not possible to fully open the book without breaking them off) and peered in.

Americanah

This was my first round reading a book by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and I loved Americanah for its humor, readability, and fearless commentary on race in America. It’s a very contemporary novel, set in the late 1990s to 2000s, as part way through, the election of Barack Obama to the American presidency is featured in dialogue. I realized as I read that most novels on my bookshelves are at least somewhat historical; its rare that I read a “right now” story. It will be interesting to visit this novel again in twenty years. Right now, this book is absolutely unflinching on the current affairs of race in America, a topic I often hear discussed as being “over” or no longer central in modern life. Still and as this book reminds us, race is alive, well, and pretty much defines how everyone interacts as Americans–if only we look from the right perspective.

The White Woman on the Green Bicycle

“They took him to the top of Paramin Hill.” —The White Woman on a Green Bicycle, by Monique Roffey

My reading in 2013 took me both to the American West and to the Caribbean. The White Woman on the Green Bicycle takes place in Trinidad and explores some of my very favorite themes—the life of the expat, the other, and the impact of colonialism.