This riverine, gorgeously textured novel is highly ambivalent about the encyclopedic knowledge that it delivers ... Henrietta [is] possibly the most intellectually resplendent heroine I’ve met in a novel ... One curious pattern that repeats itself often in Morgan’s Southern Gothic plot is a kind of murderous tattling, in which one character tells the truth to another and mayhem results, sweeping away the guilty with the less guilty ... The Sport of Kings can be wearing. Some of Morgan’s black characters are so crushed by pain and misfortune one can hardly bear to read on. But I read on. There is life, wild joy and finally salvation in the language itself. C. E. Morgan has more nerve, linguistic vitality and commitment to cosmic thoroughness in one joint of her little finger than the next hundred contemporary novelists have in their entire bodies and vocabularies.
The Sport of Kings marshals linguistic profligacy in order to approach reality’s extravagance. Morgan’s sentences often use a paratactic structure, linking clauses with a simple comma; long stretches read like litanies. This deeply cadenced structure, typical of the King James Bible, holds out the promise that if only one more item could be added to the list, the world might be captured in language. It is a sign of Morgan’s mastery that she almost convinces us that she can accomplish this impossible task...The Sport of Kings roils with anger and shimmers with beauty. It is a contemporary masterpiece.
Ms. Morgan’s literary sins, if sins they are, derive from her muse, which appears to be almost too big to carry. Because she can do anything, she tries to do everything. In The Sport of Kings she has clearly written a serious and important novel if not a great one. She has constructed an enormous bonfire that never fully lights. What’s interesting about it is her almost blinding promise.
Morgan foregrounds the mighty gears of her machinery, proudly drawing attention to the book as a Novel with a capital N; she has no compunction about killing off a woman in childbirth or conjuring up a deus ex machina. The plot ultimately buckles under the weight, like Henry’s prized filly — bighearted, fat-assed Hellsmouth, who fractures her leg in the Laurel Futurity Stakes. A moral tale becomes a sentimental one. Did Morgan have to gild Henry’s lily-white villainy by making her inbreeding zealot commit actual incest? She can’t stick the landing, either. What might have been a delirious and haunting Pyrrhic victory, a spectacular scorched-earth finish, is undone with a lame epilogue.
This is the central preoccupation of Morgan’s novel: the way that African-Americans have been forced off track, literally and figuratively, to the psychological, political, and material advantage of whites. The resulting book is enormously flawed, ceaselessly interesting, and strangely tremendous, its moral imagination so capacious that it overshadows its many missteps. Morgan recounts the long history of American racism, which is also the long history of America: liberty and bondage, settlement and expansion, white prosperity and black subjugation, the Great Migration and mass incarceration. In the face of our national faith that individuals can lift themselves up by their bootstraps, The Sport of Kings insists that this history constrains us all in ways we have barely begun to acknowledge, still less to escape.
This novel is about horse racing the way Moby-Dick is about a whale; it has a similarly expansive scope, spiritual seriousness and density of grand themes ... Along the way, Morgan wrestles with subjects including the history of Kentucky, slavery and its legacies, the iniquities of American healthcare, Darwinism, geology and relations between the sexes. In the maximalist stakes, Morgan’s novel is a muscular, confident entry ... thematic shading of many of the characters’ interactions gives the tone of this vibrant, humid novel a paradoxical coolness. Morgan’s people are restrained by the architecture of her system, as well as the systems of their American history, and of race and class.
...is neither neat nor quickly read; at over 500 pages, it is both overabundant and overwhelming — a storehouse of information about horse breeding and genetics, the history and geography of Kentucky, and the pernicious legacy of American slavery ...it is, rather, the wild centrifugal force that drives this teeming novel across the entire span of modern American history, from the Revolutionary War to the mid-2000s. If the white whale of American literature is really on the verge of extinction, then The Sport of Kings is the last of a dying breed ... There appears to be nothing her prose cannot do, nothing she cannot describe, and no one whose voice she cannot inhabit ... It is a veritable thicket of language, an intricate woodland mosaic of idiom, voice, and narrative style ... The ground covered by Morgan’s language alone makes other writers sound like stammering provincials.
Someone as sharp as Ms. Morgan is going to pad the melodrama, and the Shakespearean portents, with a bit of irony. She’s going to be self-aware. To write a book that surges and pushes at its edges, she knows, you may need to go too far. There’s much to admire about a writer who decides not to reel it in, not to retreat to a manageable scale. Where Ms. Morgan could have been pretentious, she is instead transparent. If she were a violinist, she’d be a virtuoso letting us into the rehearsal room to watch her run scales. She’s willing to let us watch her try, and even to fail.
The Sport of Kings is a novel about breeding Kentucky livestock, both animal and human. In the latter dimension it inevitably draws in race, racism, and the legacy of slavery; in its aspect of generational saga, it covers the experience of slavery directly. Stated this way, the concept of the book might sound effective but crude, but the magnificence of C.E. Morgan’s writing makes it something else altogether...Her concerns are Faulknerian in scope, or maybe even larger; while she shares Faulkner’s sense of property (human and other) as a sin afflicting the region, she also does not hesitate to delve into geological time, as well as mining the deep veins of human history, and all of it dovetails with the main saga.
Death and destruction abound in the apocalyptic finale, but The Sport of Kings closes with a darkly radiant vision of transcendence: a wounded man racing to cross one last river, his arms raised to embrace a beloved too long absent. With this extraordinary work, C.E. Morgan moves into the front rank of contemporary writers.
But now I must say something about Morgan’s style, which is as much a presence in this book as any character or theme. Many of her descriptions are powerful and precise, especially in passing on horse lore and in describing such dynamic scenes as breaking a horse, foaling, mating, and, most splendidly, running the races themselves...Such passages are tremendous, but at other times, Morgan seems to be taken over by some grandiose afflatus, her prose swelling to blot out the story itself...Aside from such passages and certain later developments, which are more symbolically potent than completely believable, the novel is a great accomplishment.
The book starts at a fever pitch and remains there. Everything from Allmon and Henrietta’s love affair to a day at the races is a high-stakes battle of identity and legacy. Given the diversity of America, the idea of the Great American Novel has perhaps outlived its usefulness. How could one author capture this sprawling nation? That being said, The Sport of Kings is a worthy contender and tells a story about America that is challenging and inclusive.
