This novel is so assured, exotic and uncategorizable, with such an unlikely provenance, that it arrives as an incontrovertible winner, a bona fide bolt from the blue … The book’s dramatis personae are of the two- and four-legged varieties. And Ms. Gordon seems to fathom both species equally well … Ms. Gordon is magically adept at fusing the banal and the mythic in a creature like [Lord of Misrule]. She’s also keenly attuned to all the aspects of carnality and power that infuse this story … Lord of Misrule edges toward some drastic final twists without ever escaping the impression that it is more of a short-story cycle than a full-fledged novel. And its texture is thick even when Ms. Gordon is at her most lighthearted.
Her four horse characters – Mr. Boll Weevil, Little Spinoza, Pelter and Lord of Misrule – are bursting with personality … Every race in these pages is strangely dramatic, no matter how cheap, and the races she describes are not only cheap, but also corrupt. Maybe the key is that the horses don't know that they are not supposed to try, and so they run themselves to the edge of their capacities just because they've been asked to. The result is that Lord of Misrule is a very somber novel, easy to like but hard to take … For that sense of being steeped in a specific and alien world, it is remarkable.
Void and menace are the operating principles in Lord of Misrule. First, it's hard to sort the men from the horses, so similar are their slaveries, their striving for nothing, their tendency to be ruled by lesser animals … This rich, soupy (as in primal soup, many ingredients) milieu that Gordon creates — all the names and hints of back story glimmering in the dust — serve to make a character shine, really shine, when he or she rises up and out. You hear chains popping all through this novel, little acts of will and big acts of self-determination. It's astonishing how quickly, with all this description, Gordon can get to a philosophical point or make a character unforgettable.
Lord of Misrule is an exuberant, jazzy novel about rough characters – both equine and two-footed – caught up in a shabby, half-mile racetrack downriver from Wheeling, W.Va … The happy kick of her novel comes largely from the argot – she throws the unbaptized reader into the deep idiom of the racetrack, circa the early 1970s. She bends the language to it – with words like ‘hurryment’ and phrases like ‘shoes screeked’ … Gordon frames her novel nominally around four races, and lets us take each of them seriously. But she is more interested in slicing out a feel for long-shots and liars, for creatures and people on their way down.
Set in the world of claiming races, this is a work about both the man and beast that inhabit it. It’s a place of luck, the threat of violence and nickel dreams … The novel comprises four novellas, a racing season that serially focuses on a horse and race. Each story is propelled to its finish by the outcome of the race, but the beauty lies in the journey. Dreamers, both winners and losers, populate Gordon’s world and the trick to survival seems to be avoiding fate’s eye … But the machinations behind a claiming race emerge, and the reader discovers that the people Hansel is trying to scam are far smarter than he’d assumed … Gordon has many gifts, not the least of which is her ability to bring a relatively arcane world to life.
Lord of Misrule is divided into sections named for horses, three of which compete in the climactic race that the book has been building toward. The slight plot is as time-worn as the worn-out horses at Indian Mound, involving a young hustler, his girl, her long-lost uncle and the hood who has it in for them … Ms. Gordon has an acute ear for the accents and desires of her lowdown characters and a wide-lens eye for the rundown, junk-filled landscape of the river towns and farms. It's an ugly, heartless world of cruelty, insults, money-grubbing, rough sex and fists in the face … Lord of Misrule is not the best novel of the year...she's too much in love with her own words and too convinced of the romance of her race track milieu to sell it hard enough to readers.
Both richly literary and red-blooded in its depictions of the sporting life, Lord of Misrule gives readers several compelling races, including a completely unexpected but fitting finale. A reader doesn't have to be a horse player to enjoy the novel, but a horse player who can handle Gordon's technique just might … Gordon, whose earlier fiction leans poetic and experimental, brings a passion for word choice and point-of-view shifting to the dark corners of the stables. Beyond the brilliant character monikers, she's pretty good at resonant horse names, too: Little Spinoza, Pelter and the titular Lord of Misrule."4
All of these people and all of the action of Lord of Misrule are served up in a narrative bouillabaisse that is often hard to swallow – sorry, I mean follow – given the author’s penchant for flights of fantasy as well as linguistic gyrations, plus some of the least interesting sexual scenes I’ve read in a long time. And her disdain for quotation marks or the use of ‘she said, he said’ further muddles the matter … On the plus side, readers will be impressed by the verisimilitude of the behind-the-track, inside-the-barn scenes … Despite such overexuberance, there is no doubt that Jaimy Gordon’s capture of the National Book Award was not a fluke. She is a powerfully imaginative and highly stylistic writer whose underground reputation is well-deserved.
Gordon structures the narrative around the four horses, the last best hope being Lord of Misrule, and she seamlessly moves the reader from one narrative consciousness to another without being manipulative or intrusive. The writing about the races themselves is a tour de force of energy and esprit. By the end of the novel none of the characters quite have what they want, but most of them get what they deserve. Exceptional writing and idiosyncratic characters make this an engaging read.
