Lord of Misrule

Read from Wednesday, December 7th to Tuesday, December 14th.

I've got eight open posts right now for books that I have read, or are currently reading.  The backlog is getting quite extensive.  As you can tell, I've been reading multiple books at a time.  I do this because I can have something on my Kindle for the treadmill, and a physical book for other places.  And then when the Rumpus Book selection comes in, I try to read that as quickly as possible for the discussion.  So I'll down a Monster, listen to some Stones, and try to bust out as many as these reviews as possible.

I've been meaning to read Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon for a while now, as it won the National Book Award for 2010.  I like reading books that offer a different perspective on the world than the one I live in, and this is one of them.  It is the story of a pair of outsiders, Tommy and Maggie, that show up one day at a run down horse track in rural West Virginia in the 1960's (I think).  Tommy is a naive, but experienced horse trainer, and he has come into some quality horses that he hopes he can use to make a quick buck at the track.  The idea is to come in quickly, race the horses and win money before anyone can catch onto the quality of the horses.  Maggie is his younger girlfriend, and they have a very abusive, but animalistic relationship. 

However, they run into problems of course.  Maggie is very attached to her animals, and when some are put in danger or sold off, she gets in over her head.  There is another trainer, a gypsy named Deucey, and a groom Medicine Ed, and Maggie buys a horse with them, Little Spinoza.  Maggie also falls under the gaze of the head trainer at the track, Joe Dale Bigg, who is a small-time mafioso.  She is protected by a loan-shark uncle, Two-Tie, but he is murdered in the woods by Bigg's henchmen.  Tommy also slowly starts to lose his mind the longer they stay at the track.  He often leaves for long periods of time, and makes irrational decisions.  Eventually, Maggie must become the heroine and confront Joe Dale Bigg after a climactic race with the legendary Lord of Misrule, and she defeats him and escapes, with a little help from Tommy, who ends up in an institution.

The story is told in four sections, one for each of the main horses, and each ending in an important race.  It is also written in a heavy dialect, which can be hard to decipher sometimes for a city boy like me.  Lord of Misrule was a great book, and I can understand why it won the award.  Overarching themes of luck and fate combine with some foxhole humor and tragedy. But such is life.  Four out of five stars.