Lord of Misrule and Horse of the Year

Defying Gravity

Don't ask how, but I came across the recent headline "Horse of the Year is Eating for Two." I didn't know there was such a thing as "horse of the year"--the year 2010 and the mare Zenyatta, who has been profiled by such racing fanatics as 60 Minutes on CBS. The Giselle Bundchen supermodel of a horse, over 7 hands at the shoulder (5'9.5") and a svelte 1200 pounds, who brought in--and still brings in--millions. She did not win the Triple Crown (apparently didn't try) but won 19 races and in her last race, the 20th, came in second. She's got legs.
Looking at lovely Zenyatta, named after a Sting song, you could believe in fairy tales and innate nobility and the divinity-on-earth that is equus. Now with a website. News that Zenyatta's in foal creates a buzz similar to an announcement that Prince William and stylish Kate are expecting. (That is not a fact. I have no privy knowledge of the newest royal couple--just wanted to jumpstart a few heart rates.) Who wouldn't want the best for Zenyatta, and the stud whose name I forgot and is no doubt fast but less interesting.
There is, of course, the tragic side to horse racing. If Zenyatta is blessed in her matronly pasturage, others seemed cursed. 2006 Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro was euthanized after state-of-the arts treatment could not alleviate suffering caused by a shattered leg. A race horse is so precisely bred and trained (in some views irresponsibly pushing the horse too far from her evolutionary template) that as with a space shuttle the slightest issue leads to ruin. Another supermodel filly, Eight Belles, was euthanized at the track after two ankles broke in the course of a race , all in front of cameras. As an ESPN writer notes, the track vet must be prepared for the worst and bear the emotional consequences.

AP Photo/ Brian Bohannon

These are dark omens of another world, one portrayed in Jaimy Gordon's novel, Lord of Misrule. The book could be called a 2010 dark-horse of the year, in the winner's circle with the National Book Award despite competition from other novels on which the media staked their bets, like Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (reviewed here in December).

I found Lord of Misrule slow out of the gate. And yes, the title is a horse's name, though this horse, a little like the famously difficult fictional animal, Moby Dick, is more of an unfathomable force. The setting for Gordon's novel is a gutter of a race track in the 1970s where "claiming races" are run. (The Man O'Wars and Zenyattas run in Stakes races.) Claiming races work something like trades in professional sports or being seeded in tennis; they keep the entries at about the same level since an owner wouldn't want to lose a really great horse to a claim out of a field of has-beens. In other words, two kinds of betting occur: the first on who crosses the finish line when; the second a secret bid just before the race to claim a horse that might be better than the one you entered. So an owner running a horse might go home with some money but no horse at all if the claiming didn't go his way.
The cast of characters, in all senses of the word, include the old African-American groom, Medicine Ed, the butch owner/trainer Deucey, the Jewish off-track influence Two-Tie (one bow tie for fashion, one for mourning), a petty gangster with the aspirational name of Bigg, a newcomer Tommy Hansel, christened the Young Fool, and his girlfriend and Ishmael of the book, Maggie. Before the term "magic realism" came about, there was the shape-shifting universe of horse racing--fortunes made and unmade in a lifetime and  90 seconds--and Maggie has been pulled into a dangerous romance with horses and with Tommy--s&m overtones with both. She seems to have a fairy-god father in remotely related Two-Tie, but that may not be enough to protect in a place where legitimacy and fair play have no mooring.
The horses are characters, too: Pelter of the long back and placid temperament; hyper-sensitive Little Spinoza with too much imagination, the strategic Mr. Boll Weevil, the massive "Mahdi," and the mysterious veteran Lord of Misrule. Suspense takes off when the races begin, and the plot pulls you in.
While Gordon, who has published several other books, is highly educated, she creates a realm where people are schooled otherwise and envision differently. She writes of Tommy that his concept of money is "notional." Savvy illiterate Ed thinks in a Mark Twain vernacular, as he sees a new horse delivered: "A van ride on race day did for many a horse, but this boy had rolled out the van as calm as that puddle yonder, for he felt good and didn't know nothing [. . .] with a chest like a car radiator." Baggy saggy Two-Tie thinks of his one close family member, a dog, that she "had superfluous IQ for her line of work, and inside all that free space in her brain she was completing a philosophy of the world wove together out of all the smells she had every smelled"; she was "history-minded." Ruled off the racetrack, Two-Tie misses that kind of close connection to the horses themselves, but finds condolence in his own philosophizing, for the briefest moment: he now has the distance to see "the whole world of half-mile racetracks and the people and animals that lived on them as one world, and not just a big, all-over-the-place, unseemly business. Of course horse racing was a business too, whatever else it might be, and in some ways he actually found it easier to keep his hand on the long strings if he didn't have to look up close at the valiant and tragic animals and the greedy conniving assholes, himself included, who took advantage of the horses' noble nature."
In this racing-noir, there are close escapes and no escapes. It is not a contemporary Black Beauty with a didactic focus on animal cruelty, though the book leaves not doubt that horses suffer. For the most part, I found Gordon's Lord of Misrule exciting, though you probably have to be a little in love with horses to find it consistently fascinating. A few qualifications--sometimes the track lingo felt contrived. Sex scenes between Tommy and Maggie were presented with a scatological roughness. Maybe it suited the characterizations and crude sex talk is an unspoken requirement for contemporary fiction; but I feel obliged to point that out for those considering class room use. I also struggled with the characterization of Tommy and tried the movie actor visualization. I could see Morgan Freeman, Hilary Swank, James Gandolfini, Kathy Bates in roles, but with Tommy I strained to come up with a pre-Jolie Brad Pitt--enticingly good looking, self-aware of a twisted vanity, and visionary in bad ways.  Maybe. The novel focuses more on flawed heroine Maggie, who might resemble the author herself in her 20s. Medicine Ed, who worked a lifetime to inure himself to treacherous sentiment, is taken aback by how horses would develop a playful give-and-take with Maggie, trusting her, teasingly chewing on her braids.  Maggie's no Jane Goodall, yet she brings out the strange seductiveness of track life and the possibilities of connection.
As for Zenyatta, she is one in a million. May all horses receive the care they deserve from us from the sin of their domestication.