"Lords of Misrule" By Jaimy Gordon, Reviewed by Sara Falls

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.