"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 for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction
"One of this year's best novels."The Boston Globe "Magnificent."GQ "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."The New York Times Book Review
"C.E. Morgan tackles destiny, race, love, and family with such thought-provoking, stunning prose that even at its most disturbing, it’s beautiful to read. This book is destined to be an American classic. I haven’t read anything this powerful, moving, and jaw-dropping in many years."The San Diego Union-Tribune "Ravishing and ambitious . . . [A] serious and important novel."The New York Times
"[A]sprawling, magisterial Southern Gothic for the twenty-first century."O, The Oprah Magazine “Majestic and sorrowful . . . With this extraordinary work, C.E. Morgan moves into the front rank of contemporary writers.”Newsday "Everyone thinks [The Sport of Kings] is about horse racing, when it’s really about everything: love, race, legacy, family, justice, poverty, and American inequality. On top of that, it’s one of the most gorgeous books I’ve read in many years. When I finished the book, I immediately called a friend and said 'this book is precisely why I do the work I do.'"Lisa Lucas, executive director of the National Book Foundation, for The Millions (A Year in Reading)
"A world-encompassing colossus of a second novel . . . Constantly invigorating,surprising, and transfixing."The Times Literary Supplement "[A]sweeping, ambitious novel . . . Spectacularly well-written."The Wall Street Journal
"Remarkable achievements . . . 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’tand Morgan can do things that other novelists can’t . . . Tremendous, the work of a writer just starting to show us what she can do."The New Yorker
"Vivid epic of rage and racism on a Kentucky stud farm exposes the myth of the American dream."The Spectator (UK)
"Spirited, fast and almost perfectly formed."The Times (UK)
"With The Sport of Kings , C. E. Morgan has delivered a masterpiece. Rich, deep, and ambitious, this book is, by any standard, a Great American Novel."Philipp Meyer, author of The Son
"[The Sport of Kings ] is an epic novel steeped in American history and geography . . . Morgan’s gothic tale of Southern decadence deepens into a searing investigation of racism’s enduring legacy . . . Vaultingly ambitious, thrillingly well-written, charged with moral fervor and rueful compassion. How will this dazzling writer astonish us next time?"Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Morgan has dared to write the kind of book that was presumed long extinct: a high literary epic of America."The 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."The Financial Times
The Sport of Kings is C. E. Morgan's second novel, and it's a big one in every sense: Its 560 pages span more than two centuries of love, hatred, and dramatic action on the part of over a score of interlinked characters, human and equine. Its themes are mythic and scientific and a fusion of the two. It traces changing social and economic arrangements and deals throughout with the crime of slavery and its legacy into the twenty-first century. Finally, as its title suggests, it is a story of high-stakes horse racing and thoroughbred breeding. At the book's center is the Forge family and its extensive estate in Kentucky. It was founded in the late eighteenth century by a certain Samuel Forge, who, accompanied by one of his slaves, made his way from Virginia through the wilderness to stake out the land that became Forge Run Farm. He prospered, becoming rich off agriculture, livestock, and slave labor, and the estate passed down through the generations. The story really picks up in the 1950s, when we meet the family's sixth and seventh generations: John Henry Forge, married to Lavinia, and their young son, Henry. An angry, brutal man and a deep-dyed racist, John Henry is revolted by the growing civil rights movement. He has plenty of ideas about the innate inferiority of black people and the usefulness of the Klan "country types, almost unfathomably stupid and passionate" in carrying out the "justice" that the courts will not. He sets out his noxious views in a magisterial way to Henry, who, most unfortunately, has witnessed his mother and a hired black man, Filip, in a passionate embrace. Seized by the impulse to act upon a grudge he has borne against Filip, Henry hints at what's going on and instantly regrets it, walking "out of the room, feeling as though an enormous age-old wheel had been set creaking into motion." And indeed it has: "The next morning, Filip did not return from a sudden woodland journey with five men and a length of rope." This retributive villainy will have consequences that detonate at novel's end. Morgan brings us through Henry's childhood, during which he becomes gripped by the idea of switching Forge Run Farm's business from growing corn to breeding horses which his incensed father considers nothing but a "a cheap attempt at dignity." The older man is felled by a stroke in 1965, and Henry swiftly puts his scheme in train and soon has a thriving operation, as well as a wife who leaves him and one child, Henrietta. Like all the Forges, Henry is fixated on begats, both his family's and his horses', as, to an extent, is his daughter. She, however, takes a Darwinian view of nature, a vision of diversity in contrast to Henry's. He looks inward, toward purity of line, becoming consumed with the idea of breeding back toward an ideal, including an ideal Forge bad news there and, in the case of horses, toward Secretariat. Thus he mates a mare who was sired by that great champion to a stallion who also possesses Secretariat's blood. The result is a phenomenal filly named Hellsmouth. Just born, she stands "on stalk legs borrowed from a dam and sire of the same line, a tight constellation of traits to be passed along in due order." And so the novel is on its way to the training stables and high-stakes races. But as all that has been unfolding, further worlds and perspectives have been opening up. Moving back and forth through time, Morgan has picked up the fate of a slave called Scipio: his escape from Kentucky into Ohio and the tragedy of his life. More centrally, she gives us Allmon Shaughnessy, quite likely the descendant of Scipio, who grows up in Cincinnati, the son of a black mother and an entirely feckless white father. Allmon ends up as a groom for the Forge family, eventually becoming Hellsmouth's dedicated attendant. I will leave the plot there, though there is much, much more that is surprising, shocking, terrible, and completely absorbing. But now I must say something about Morgan's style, which is as much a presence in this book as any character or theme. Many of her descriptions are powerful and precise, especially in passing on horse lore and in describing such dynamic scenes as breaking a horse, foaling, mating, and, most splendidly, running the races themselves. Here is Hellsmouth or Hell, as they call her infuriatingly contrary and matchless at Belmont:
Breaking from the four hole, Hell slopped and thrashed into the race like an overexcited dog, then settled straightaway into a loopy, loping, embarrassing last. Even as the field began to jostle and strategize along the rail and the far outside, the filly couldn't be bothered and expended no run at all. On she goes, just rolling along "on her lovely pleasure cruise," until, finally edging up, she picks up speed to go neck and neck with three other horses. As they enter the homestretch, her jockey gives her one stinging smack with his crop: Her muscles leaping beneath her skin, Hellsmouth exploded out of her gait with such vicious power, her first free stride made the previous three-quarters of a mile seem nothing but a lark. As she shot forward she bore in toward the rail and delivered one, fast teeth-rattling bump to Play Some Music. While Racz cropped and corrected his faltering bay, Hellsmouth drove to the wire with a stride so long and self-assured, so dazzlingly late, that the grandstand rose as a single entity, driven by a surge of energy that seemed to come from the very center of the earth. Farmers three miles distant heard the cry when, fully extended with her limbs threatening the limits of form, Hell shot under the wire. Such passages are tremendous, but at other times, Morgan seems to be taken over by some grandiose afflatus, her prose swelling to blot out the story itself: Over [Henrietta's] drowsy head , the daily war of morning ensued: dews rose, shrugging off their sleep and skimming briefly over the fields in the altering dark. 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. Elsewhere peculiar and distracting, if not downright Gnostic, conceits spring up: A man reasons his way to irrational numbers. It was a strange paradox, Mother's beauty was never-ending, thus never repeating, it went on and on and on, an irrationality. Her face was a beautiful math, a womanly number without equivalent fraction. I suppose such writing is a matter of taste, but it is not to mine, and I kept wishing it didn't intrude upon the scene. Aside from such passages and certain later developments, which are more symbolically potent than completely believable, the novel is a great accomplishment. Each of the key actors possesses enormous psychological depth, each struggles against both self-destructive impulses and the terms of his or her social and economic existence. 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.Katherine A. Powers reviews books widely and has been a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. She is the editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963. Reviewer: Katherine A. Powers
The Barnes & Noble Review
…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.
The New York Times Book Review - Jaimy Gordon
…ravishing 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 lotshe 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.
The New York Times - Dwight Garner
03/07/2016 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. (May)
★ 05/15/2016 Underscoring the importance of place in fiction, Eudora Welty once wrote, "One place understood helps us understand all places better." For Morgan (All the Living), Kentucky is the place; she's a longtime resident and an alumna of Berea College. Here, Henry Forge, the heir to a legacy estate in the state, dedicates both his fortune and life to the sport of kings. At Forge Run Farm, Henrietta, Henry's daughter, tends to both her father's aspirations for Hellsmouth, their award-winning filly thoroughbred, and her growing sexual predilections. However, when her attention turns toward Allmon, a black stable hand, Henrietta finds herself defying both her father's racial prejudice and his dynastic aspirations. Though set in the 21st century, the narrative establishes each character's backstory to reveal how the tendrils of the Bluegrass State's racial history continue to color and coil around the present. Morgan also employs the pastoral vistas and calcium-rich bluegrass of Kentucky to tell a universal tale in a very specific setting. VERDICT A dense meditation on the ugliness that undergirds much of the sublime we as humans strive for and admire in life. [See Prepub Alert, 11/9/15.]—Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Lab., NM
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
★ 2016-02-29 Morgan follows up her slim, keening debut (All the Living, 2009) with an epic novel steeped in American history and geography. As a boy, Henry Forge determines to turn the land his aristocratic Kentucky family has planted with corn for generations into a farm for racehorses. Henry grows into an arrogant, hard man, imbued with the unthinking racism and sexism of his haughty father and unnaturally focused on his only child, Henrietta. Before she leaves him, wife Judith loudly voices the novel's seething strain of bitterness about the lot of women in this world, but her anger is nothing compared to the rage of Allmon Shaughnessy, an African-American man who enters the story in the early 2000s, when Henrietta and he are both in their 20s. Backtracking to trace Allmon's past, Morgan's gothic tale of Southern decadence deepens into a searing investigation of racism's enduring legacy. Allmon's ailing, hard-pressed mother and her father, a storefront preacher and veteran civil rights activist, are notable among the teeming cast of brilliantly drawn secondary characters who populate the bleak saga of an intelligent, sensitive boy with zero prospects; by the time he's 17, Allmon is in jail, where he discovers the knack with horses that gets him hired on the Forges' farm. A few years go by, Henrietta and Allmon become lovers, but there's little hope of a happy future for such damaged people. A series of five brilliant riffs called Interludes anchor this modern tale in a vast sweep of geological time and the grim particulars of Allmon's ancestor, a runaway slave named Scipio. The consequences of the Forges' brutality and pride come home to roost in an apocalyptic climax just after their extraordinary filly Hellsmouth runs the 2006 Kentucky Derby; it's entirely appropriate to Morgan's dark vision that it's not the guiltiest who pay the highest price. Vaultingly ambitious, thrillingly well-written, charged with moral fervor and rueful compassion. How will this dazzling writer astonish us next time?