5/21/2023 0 Comments The Sport of Kings by C.E. MorganThese critics should admit at least one thing about The Sport of Kings: it has revealed a glaring lapse in America’s cross-regional literacy. Morgan’s novel is without question the year’s most ambitious (so far), but whatever its faults and glories, I’ve noticed a regional hesitance, an unsure hand on the part of its critics, who either read it as a caricature of Kentucky (it isn’t) or somehow as if it could take place anywhere (let’s say Ohio). What results is an ambitious, beautifully written, and melodramatically plotted thing, a book that sweeps the reader into the alien corn. But as it trails the Forge family throughout its history, the novel also documents the wrongs they perpetrate against others - from their slaveholding past to their rotten present. Numbered among those concerns, anyone familiar with the region will know, is the sport of horse racing, and along these lines, the novel tells the story of the Forge family - from the self-educated patriarch John Henry to his son Henry and his granddaughter Henrietta - and their attempt to breed a thoroughbred on the level of Secretariat. It is a vast and audacious and self-conscious regional novel, one that is tied to the land, history, and social concerns of Central (or East-Central) Kentucky over many generations. Morgan’s second novel, The Sport of Kings, is an oddity among recent American fictions.
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