The Sport of Kings
C.E. Morgan, 2016
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
560 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250131843
Summary
An American tale centered on a horse and two families: one white, a Southern dynasty whose forefathers were among the founders of Kentucky; the other African-American, the descendants of their slaves.
It is a dauntless narrative that stretches from the fields of the Virginia piedmont to the abundant pastures of the Bluegrass, and across the dark waters of the Ohio River; from the final shots of the Revolutionary War to the resounding clang of the starting bell at Churchill Downs.
As C. E. Morgan unspools a fabric of shared histories, past and present converge in a Thoroughbred named Hellsmouth, heir to Secretariat and a contender for the Triple Crown. Newly confronted with one another in the quest for victory, the two families must face the consequences of their ambitions, as each is driven — and haunted — by the same, enduring question: How far away from your father can you run?
A sweeping narrative of wealth and poverty, racism and rage, The Sport of Kings is an unflinching portrait of lives cast in the shadow of slavery and a moral epic for our time. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1976
• Where—Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.M., Berea College; Th.M., Harvard Divinity School
• Awards—Whiting Award (more below)
• Currently—lives in Berea, Kentucky
Catherine Elaine Morgan is an American author of the novels, The Sport of Kings (2016) and All the Living (2009) She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. As an undergraduate, she studied voice at Berea College, a tuition-free labor college for students from poor and working-class backgrounds in Appalachia. In exchange for a free education, all students work for the college while enrolled. Morgan also attended Harvard Divinity School, where she studied literature and religion and attained her Masters in Theology. While at Harvard, she wrote her first novel, All the Living. She lives in Berea, Kentucky, with her husband.
Recognition and Awards
2009 - National Book Foundation "5 under 35" Award
2010 - Lannan Literary Fellowship
2012 - United States Artists Fellow Award
2013 - Whiting Award
2016 - Windham–Campbell Literature Prizes (Fiction)
2016 - Kirkus Prize (Fiction)
2017 - Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
2017 - Finalist, James Tait Black Prize for Fiction
2017 - Finalist, Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction (former Orange Prize)
2017 - Finalist, Rathbones Folio Prize
2017 - Longlist, Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence
(Author Bio dapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/29/2017.)
Book Reviews
[R]avishing and ambitious…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.… 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…Ms. Morgan's prose has some of [Terrence Malick'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.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
The Sport of Kings…abounds with Faustian characters and dangerous learning…C. E. Morgan [possesses]…a boundless breadth of knowledge on the darker history of humans and horses in Kentucky…[a] riverine, gorgeously textured novel…There is life, wild joy and finally salvation in the language itself. C. E. Morgan has more nerve, linguistic vitality and commitment to cosmic thoroughness in one joint of her little finger than the next hundred contemporary novelists have in their entire bodies and vocabularies
Jaimy Gordon - New York Times Book Review
Morgan has dared to write the kind of book that was presumed long extinct: a high literary epic of America.
Telegraph (UK)
Sport of Kings boasts a plot that maintains tension and pace, and Morgan weaves its characters, its themes, its several histories together in a marvelous display of literary control and follow-through.
Christian Science Monitor
[A] rich and compulsive new novel.… This book confirms [Morgan] as the new torchbearer of the Southern Gothic tradition.… What emerges is a panoramic view of race relations in America, from the slow crumbling of the Jim Crow laws until shortly before the election of Barack Obama, with occasional glimpses into the more distant past. Racing provides the novel’s overarching metaphor for race (a set of tracks that determine the course of a life, and for which the correct breeding is essential), and Morgan’s white characters are hardly less constricted by history than her black ones.… It’s a bleak and bitter inversion of the American dream — a world in which circumstances are impossible to change, and legacies impossible to shake.… [Morgan is]…an immersive storyteller.… Her prose is often ravishingly beautiful, displaying an unerring instinct for metaphor and music.
Financial Times (UK)
Remarkable achievement.… The Sport of Kings hovers between fiction, history, and myth, its characters sometimes like the ancient ones bound to their tales by fate, its horses distant kin to those who drew the chariot of time across the sky . . . Novelists can do things that other writers can’t—and Morgan can do things that other novelists can’t.… Tremendous, the work of a writer just starting to show us what she can do.
New Yorker
[A]sprawling, magisterial Southern Gothic for the twenty-first century.
Oprah Magazine
[E]njoyable if overwritten…. The novel starts strong out of the gate…then blows it in the backstretch with a series of melodramatic incidents that undermines the care with which Morgan has created these larger-than-life characters. However, …the novel’s authentically pungent shed-row atmosphere, [is] ultimately satisfying as a mint julep on Derby Day.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Though set in the 21st century, the narrative establishes each character's backstory to reveal how the tendrils of …racial history continue to color and coil around the present.… A dense meditation on the ugliness that undergirds much of the sublime we as humans strive for and admire in life. —Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Lab., NM
Library Journal
C.E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings takes the kind of dauntless, breathtaking chances readers once routinely expected from the boldest of American novels.… It is a profoundly orchestrated work that is both timeless and up-to-the-minute in its concerns, the most notable of which is what another Kentucky-bred novelist, Robert Penn Warren, once labeled "the awful responsibility of time."
Judges' panel - Kirkus Prize for Fiction
(Starred review.) [A]n epic novel steeped in American history and geography.… Vaultingly ambitious, thrillingly well-written, charged with moral fervor and rueful compassion. How will this dazzling writer astonish us next time?
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The Sport of Kings opens with a question that resounds throughout the story: "How far away from your father can you run?" Later, Henry Forge reflects, "That was the game of youth, wasn’t it — murdering one’s father?" (p. 312) Henry, Henrietta, and Allmon Shaughnessy all rebel against their fathers’ identities and values. How far away does each of them ultimately manage to run? What impact do their mothers have, present and absent?
2. John Henry Forge mixes learning with cruelty, arrogance, and isolation as he fashions an education for his son, Henry. How do Henry’s lessons with his father compare to his teaching of Henrietta? And how does this compare with what Allmon learns during his time in juvenile detention? (p. 269)
3. When teaching Henrietta about Thoroughbreds, Henry says, "Evolution is a ladder, and our aim is to climb it as quickly as possible." (p. 105) There are many references to ladders throughout the book. What might these signify beyond Henry’s understanding of evolution?
4. Unlike the Forges, Jamie Barlow, Ginnie Miller, Penn, and Lou, the veterinarians are not wealthy or powerful. They speak a plain language about a simple world, thereby offering comfort, relief, and sanctuary. What wisdom do they try to convey to Henry and Henrietta? How do they compare with the nonfamilial influences in Allmon’s life?
5. When Henry is at last free of his father, letting the Forge farm go fallow so he can plant clover and raise horses, does he break free of the past or is he somehow perpetuating the legacy of his ancestors?
6. The Sport of Kings comprises a narrative thread about the Forge family and Hellsmouth interspersed with self-contained stories. Some of these stories read like myths or folktales; others have biblical echoes. How do these inform the main narrative, and how do they contribute to the themes of this novel?
7. What are Henrietta’s passions as a girl and how do they shape the woman she becomes? How does she change after her encounter with Penn?
8. Are there times in their lives when the main characters experience real love as opposed to lust, admiration, greed, or other emotions they mistake or substitute for love? Do Henrietta and Allmon love each other?
9. Discuss the culture and codes of the Jockey Club. What is at stake besides money? What are the parallels between Hellsmouth’s captivity and Allmon’s?
10. What does Allmon learn from his grandfather? What is the meaning of his sermon? (pp. 215–221) How does the jockey Reuben Bedford Walker III relate to the Reverend?
11. What does the genesis story, featuring the God of Pine Mountain, say about the origins of human suffering?
12. How does Henry feel about horses as a boy? As a breeder? After Henrietta’s death? Based on the last line of chapter 6, what might Hellsmouth’s future hold?
13. Why doesn’t Allmon kill Henry? When he goes into Henry’s house to set it on fre, what is he seeking to destroy?
14. The book is structured with six chapters, fve interludes, and an epilogue. What is the purpose of the interludes? Did they distract from or enhance your experience as a reader? How did you interpret the epilogue? Is there redemption in The Sport of Kings?
15. In The Sport of Kings and in her debut novel, All the Living, what images of longing and hunger does C. E. Morgan create? What is the ultimate source of solace for her characters? How do both novels capture humanity’s relationship to the natural world?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)