Review: In C. E. Morgan’s ‘The Sport of Kings,’ Racing Against the Tide

Art facts: In 1955, Sports Illustrated sent William Faulkner to cover the Kentucky Derby. The article that resulted didn’t have much in common with sports journalism. It was a prose poem, a sensorium. Its thesis statement, which I have located with the aid of bloodhounds, is probably this: “What the horse supplies to man is something deep and profound in his emotional nature and need.”

C. E. Morgan’s ravishing and ambitious new horse-world novel, “The Sport of Kings,” taps into that nature and need. It’s a mud-flecked epic, replete with fertile symbolism, that hurtles through generations of Kentucky history.

On its surface, “The Sport of Kings” has enough incident (arson, incest, a lynching, miscegenation, murder) to sustain a 1980s-era television mini-series. You might title that mini-series “Lexington!” Michael Landon would play a dynastic horse breeder, tanked up on destiny, with a whip in one hand and a mint julep in the other.

But Ms. Morgan is not especially interested in surfaces, or in conventional plot migrations. She’s an interior writer, with deep verbal and intellectual resources. She fills your head with all that exists in hers, and that is quite a lot — she has a special and almost Darwinian interest in consanguinity, in the barbed things that are passed on in the blood of people and of horses, like curses, from generation to generation.

This book relates the story of one of Kentucky’s oldest and most influential families, the Forges, from just after the Revolutionary War to the mid-2000s. Henry Forge and his daughter, Henrietta, work to breed a monster of a horse — Hellsmouth, the next Secretariat. Henry is his own kind of racist monster.

C. E. Morgan Credit Guy Mendes

This novel tracks, just as fully, the lives and history of the family’s slaves and black workers. There is a resonant moment — one I suspect filmmakers will find hard to resist — when the family’s black cook, who fled decades earlier in grave distress, returns as a well-known writer to visit a special kind of revenge on the Forges.

This is Ms. Morgan’s second novel. Her first, “All the Living” (2009), was also set in Kentucky. It’s a small and perceptive novel about a young couple on an isolated tobacco farm.

Ms. Morgan is interested in isolation personally as well as literarily. She is aloof from the wheels of publishing and public relations. She mostly shuns interviews. When she does grant one, she talks about her work and little else.

When she had a short story in The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” fiction issue in 2010, she consented to answer questions for the magazine’s website. They got out of her little more than her name, rank and serial number, or, rather, place of birth (Ohio), year (1976) and current domicile (Kentucky).

The New Yorker also asked, “Who are your favorite writers over 40?” She responded: “Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, Marilynne Robinson, Terrence Malick’s screenwriting.”

There’s a bit of each of these writers in Ms. Morgan’s diction, focus and tone. The name that leaps out at me from this list is Mr. Malick’s. Ms. Morgan’s prose has some of that filmmaker’s elastic sense of time. Her pace frequently slows to a dream-crawl as she scrutinizes the natural world as if cell by cell. Then, with the flick of a thoroughbred’s tail, we are catapulted generations forward or back.

Mr. Malick’s movies can be maddening in their pauses, their stalls and starts. Ms. Morgan’s novel is often similarly so. In “The Sport of Kings,” each blade of grass seems to sway with fat significance, as if to “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” She exhausts her surroundings; she exhausts us.

A sunrise is not merely a sunrise. Instead, “After a long night of sleep in the underbelly of the earth, the armored sun rose and charged the horizon, pressing against the dark with long arms until night fell back, wounded and floundering, to earth’s antipodal edge.” There is a tab of LSD and shreds of the King James Bible in this morning tumbler of bourbon.

At one point a voice that is Ms. Morgan’s but not quite hers emerges to ask, “Is all this too purple, too florid? Is more too much – the world and the words? Do you prefer your tales lean, muscular, and dry, leached of excess and honed to a single, digestible point? Have I exceeded the bounds of the form, committed a literary sin?”

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.

In a 2014 interview in The Paris Review, the critic Vivian Gornick described what appealed to her about Rachel Kushner’s novel “The Flamethrowers” (2013). Ms. Gornick said, “She’s doing big, long riffs on these subjects — she’s doing motorcycles, she’s doing Las Vegas, she’s doing the international art world — that men have always taken for themselves.” 

I felt something similar while reading “The Sport of Kings.” Most of this novel’s central characters are men. Ms. Morgan bears down incisively on topics — the lust for speed and power and domination, the prison experience of black men, male camaraderie, the bonds between fathers and sons, the brute intricacies of the dirty Southern soul — that men have tended to claim.

Horses, Faulkner said in Sports Illustrated, tap something in us. That something, in Ms. Morgan’s telling, is only rarely pretty. The subject of reparations for slavery hangs in this novel’s humid air. An elderly black woman utters what are perhaps this novel’s five crucial words: “I am the bill collector.”