NEWS

Industry News

Most Popular Stories

Most E-mailed Stories

Gordon captures racetrack grit in ‘Lord of Misrule’

Posted: Friday, December 17, 2010 11:43 AM

McPherson & Co. publishing

by Teresa Genaro

While Jaimy Gordon acknowledges that winning the National Book Award last month for her novel Lord of Misrule was exciting, that accolade might take the place position behind a phone call she got before the book’s official publication date.

“I came home one day, and there was this message on my answering machine,” Gordon said. “It was Andy Beyer. Can you imagine how thrilling it was to hear that?”

Though Gordon, an English professor at Western Michigan University, is now firmly ensconced in academia, her years in the stable area left her with a fondness for horse racing, the subject of her award-winning novel.

“I was absolutely thrilled by the idea that bettors in America would hear about the novel; I wanted to write a book that could reach the racing crowd while still being a fairly literary book,” she said by phone from her home in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Gordon grew up in Baltimore and drew on some childhood racing connections as she wrote.

“My father was a good friend of Bobby Meyerhoff, who owned Broad Brush [and whose brother Harry] was an owner of Spectacular Bid. The Meyerhoffs still own horses, and they helped me get on the backstretch of Pimlico [Race Course] to interview people for the book,” she said.

“I talked to Richard Small—a great old-time trainer, a real trainer’s trainer—and he introduced me to some of the old black grooms who’d never done anything except be on the racetrack.”

These conversations infused the character of Medicine Ed, the groom who is in many ways the heart of Gordon’s novel. Like many of the grooms to whom Gordon spoke and with whom she worked, Medicine Ed’s fortunes are tied to the successes of the horses he works with.

“I wanted to know what it was like to be a groom who worked for really high-class barns, and then slowly, for complicated reasons, ended up as a kind of journeyman groom without a clear future,” Gordon said. “That was the fate of many of the people who worked for us at Charles Town [Races].”

Gordon worked for a small operation in the late 1960s-early 1970s at the West Virginia track.

“Five or six horses, and I did everything,” she said. “I hotwalked; I groomed. … Once I even had to be an owner, in one of those situations where it looks better if the trainer isn’t listed as the owner.”

That horse’s name was Tower Jet.

“I wished that he had a better name,” she laughed. “I love the poetry of proper nouns in horses’ names.”

The only poetry found in Lord of Misrule is in Gordon’s evocative language; readers will search in vain for pastoral mornings on the backstretch and the unbridled thrill of horses testing each other. In Gordon’s own words, the novel is about people who are “well aware of their doom and facing it stoically and with good humor.”

The plot centers on characters desperate to make a score, and Gordon does not shy from writing in gritty detail about the lengths to which hardened race-trackers will go to collect, in the winner’s circle and at the windows. The book offers few glimpses of redemption or of beauty; what hopefulness, naïve though it may be, resides in Maggie, who follows her boyfriend to the racetrack after abandoning her job as a food writer at a small paper.

Maggie is no saint, but her certainty of purpose, even when she makes a terrible mistake, endows her with a sort of integrity among characters devoid of it. In Maggie, Gordon offers glimpses of what she herself loves about the track.

“Turf races thrill me,” Gordon said. “I love them because they’re so dramatic; I love when horses come from behind like they do on grass. For me, that’s like religion. I feel like I just saw God when that happens.”

Gordon’s favorite turf superstar is Goldikova (Ire), and her devotion is so strong that she watches the three-time Breeders’ Cup Mile (G1) winner every day.

“Some people have to go chapel daily; I have to watch races,” Gordon said.

The daily roster of races often includes any (or all) of Goldikova’s three Breeders’ Cup wins as well as Dry Martini’s win in the 2008 Suburban Handicap (G2).

“He won it on my birthday [July 4th], and I feel like it’s a birthday present to me,” Gordon said.

Living in Kalamazoo, Gordon does not have much opportunity to make it to live racing these days, and she does not stay up on the news as much as she would like to either.

“There’s no track within striking distance of where I live,” she said. “I don’t get any horse racing channels because if I did, I’d just watch racing all day.”

To order Lord of Misrule new from Amazon.com for $15, click here.

Teresa Genaro is a New York-based correspondent of Thoroughbred Times who blogs at BrooklynBackstretch.com