The Sport of Kings

March 7, 2016
Morgan’s enjoyable if overwritten novel about horse racing is, at heart, a story about parents and children. In 1965, Henry Forge, scion of a powerful white Kentucky dynasty, defies his tyrannical father’s wishes by turning their corn farm into a horse farm, where he hopes to turn out thoroughbred racers. Set around the year 2007, Henry’s equally headstrong daughter, Henrietta, defies her father by hiring a black ex-con named Allmon Shaughnessy to work in the stables. Raised in Cincinnati by a well-meaning single mother suffering from Lupus, Allmon drifted into petty crime at an early age. Now he is trying to make a new start at Forge Run Farm, where Henry and Henrietta have pinned all their hopes on Hellsmouth, a thoroughbred filly from an historic bloodline. Henry, having inherited his father’s belief in the inferiority of the black race, does everything possible to stop the growing attraction between Allmon and his daughter, but fate has a shocking destiny in store for them. The novel starts strong out of the gate, with Henry, Henrietta, and Allmon each getting nearly 100 pages for his or her own immersive backstory, then blows it in the backstretch with a series of melodramatic incidents that undermines the care with which Morgan (All the Living) has created these larger-than-life characters. However, fans of Jane Smiley’s Horse Heaven and Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule will appreciate the novel’s authentically pungent shed-row atmosphere, as ultimately satisfying as a mint julep on Derby Day.

C.E. Morgan's novel about Kentucky horse breeders travels a long and winding road to arrive at the meat of the story--the Forge family's desperate effort to breed the next Secretariat. George Newbern's narration reflects that slow Southern pace--but without any of the atmosphere that pulls the listener into the setting. In a few character descriptions Morgan specifically mentions the drawn-out vowels of their speech, and Newbern hints at a Southern accent in these cases but then fails to maintain it. Class and race also play a strong role in the story, but little is done to verbally indicate these differences. Newbern's reading is adequate, but given the protracted story, there's nothing exceptional to keep the listener engaged in the plot's painful lulls. J.F. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine