Lord of Misrule
by Jaimy Gordon
Summary
Indian Mound Downs is a half mile track in the West Virginia panhandle, the cheapest rung of American racing, where broken down horses run for purses that would not cover a vet bill and everyone on the backside is one bad claim from ruin. Into it, in a horse van at dawn, comes Tommy Hansel, a young trainer with a gyp's scheme: enter four good horses where they look like nothing, cash the bets before anyone notices, and get out before the track's claiming rules let the sharks take them. The track notices immediately.
Gordon builds the novel as four races, one for each of Tommy's horses, and hands the telling around the backside: Medicine Ed, a seventy two year old Black groom with sixty years of racetrack wisdom and a half remembered hoodoo recipe he is too honest to use, almost; Two Tie, the track's elderly Jewish loan shark, running his rackets on a code of courtliness; Deucey, a tough old woman gyp; and Maggie Koderer, Tommy's girlfriend, new to horses, whose education in the track's beauty and cruelty is the reader's. Over it all hangs the stakes race and the arrival of Lord of Misrule, a sinister, storied old campaigner, and the novel keeps its title's promise: the cheap track is carnival, hierarchy inverted, and somebody always pays for the festival.
The prose is the event, racetrack argot fused to high style.
Around three hundred pages.
Best for readers who want to be dropped into a world with its own complete language, and the best American novel about the horse business at the bottom.
Historical Context & Significance
Lord of Misrule won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2010 in the great modern shock result: Jaimy Gordon was a sixty six year old writing professor whose books had appeared from tiny presses for decades, this one published by McPherson and Company, a press so small that supplying copies after the win became a news story of its own. The industry press treated the win as a fable about what the prize could still do, and the book promptly found the national readership forty years of cult standing had not supplied.
Gordon knew the world at first hand, having worked the cheap tracks of West Virginia in her twenties as a groom and hot walker, and reviewers marvelled at the argot, critics cataloguing her racetrack vocabulary with visible delight.
The comparison everyone reached for was the racetrack fiction of Damon Runyon run through high modernism, and the novel has settled in as the standard answer to a certain question: the best book almost nobody had heard of the day before it won.