The Sport of Kings

The Sport of Kings, by C.E. Morgan, was a finalist for this year's Pulitzer Prize and I don't what the panel was thinking. This was a very disappointing book, so over-written it was sometimes funny, and I'm sure that was not the author's intention. Somewhere rattling around in there is a good book about horse racing, but this is padded and lugubrious.

The book is a saga about a family of Kentuckians. Henry Forge is the central character. We first see him as a boy, dealing with an overbearing father who is a farmer. The family has grown rich and was one of the first families to settle the region. "God, how he hated his father, loved him, hated him—regardless, all the tangled roots of his inherited heart grew forever in the same direction: I am his."

Henry's father is a racist, and when Henry's mother dallies with a black servant there is hell to pay (the servant disappears). Henry becomes fascinated with horses, but the father says there will never be horses bred on the farm. But of course he will die, and as soon as he does Henry goes into the thoroughbred business.

Morgan knows her stuff about horses and racing, and those is the best parts of the book. Forge Farms will become a successful outfit, and an offspring of Secretariat (many real horses are mentioned) becomes his dream horse. The description of the Kentucky Derby is thrilling, and I honestly couldn't predict how it would come out.

I could predict other parts of the book. Henry inherits his father's racism, so we know that his headstrong daughter, Henrietta, will have an affair with a black man. Sure enough, she hires Allmon Shaughnessy, an ex-con, as a groom. He gets his own section, describing his life as the biracial son of a single mother in Cincinatti. This part of the book was the least interesting, as I think we've heard this story a million times.

Morgan frequently goes into a mode that is stream of consciousness that I found pretentious and silly. "It’s all her fault—seductress! She was too voluptuous, too hot-blooded and luxuriant. She lay in the undulatory grasses under green, fireworking trees, drunk on the liquor of Nature when the Other pricked her lip and butterflied her and split the red carbuncle." So goes a sex scene. As a writer of erotica myself, I find almost all literary sex scenes bad because they try to go high and don't mention the dirty bits. Split the red carbuncle? At one point she turns to the reader and asks, "Or is all this too purple, too florid?" Yes.

As long as Morgan sticks to horses this is acceptable. She writes: "The breeders are breeding bigger horses on weaker legs, the owners rarely live around the horses and most are in it for the money or the bragging rights, the trainers and the vets are shooting them up with drugs and running
them injured, and the jockeys are making big bucks on their backs." But lest you feel too bad about the horses, she also writes, "If you closed every racetrack in the world, hung every bridle and threw open every paddock, horses would still race one another on the open plain."

The Sport of Kings is a decent 300-page book trapped in a sloppy 560 page book.