Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon: Brief Review and Giveaway

I probably never would have picked up Jaimy Gordon's Lord of Misrule had it not won the National Book Award, but, thankfully, it did. My brief review is below, but more to the point, I'm pleased to have a copy to give to an interested reader. If you'd like to be entered in the drawing, please send an email with the subject line LORD OF MISRULE to readingape AT gmail DOT com. Entries will accepted until Friday March 11th at 11:59 pm EST. 

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There's something about the coexistence of sadness and romance in horse-racing that's hard to pin down; while its halcyon days are long past, horse-racing retains some of the pageantry and mystery that once made it the sport of kings (now the sport of conglomerates and sheiks). 

The recognition and maintenance of this duality is to my mind the central achievement of Jaimy Gordon's Lord of Misrule. Her characters are down and desperate, but not despairing. Hope is kindled by the prospect of a big win, but the hope is on the level of a trailer home to call your own. Few of the characters seem to have any designs on leaving the track and even fewer of the horses possess anything like quality. Even the plot of the novel seems aimless and beside the point; scene and sentiment are as important as success. 

Ultimately it is Gordon's linguistic verdancy that imbues the near-squalor of low-stakes horse-racing with something like nobility. Her casual, unremarked on deployment of a by-gone lexicon resuscitates, however briefly, the possibility of the perfect horse and the transcendent race.

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Dictionary of Fictional Techniques: The Generalized Categorical

I've long admired the formidable Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. When I was studying poetry early in my graduate education, I coveted my poetry studying colleagues' ability to reference this work to identify and articulate poetic devices and always wanted an equivalent for the close study of fiction.

Unfortunately, I've never run across anything up to scratch. So, I am going to write one. Or at least write one entry for one and then try slowly to add more entries over time. (If any readers out there want to suggest future entries, even just point out something that seems like it might be a technique, let me know and I might write about it).

So here's my first entry (with example), inspired by my current read, Jaimy Gordon's NBA-winning Lord of Misrule:

The Generalized Categorical

Definition: a reference to an unknown, abstract category or condition. Primarily used to describe a specific, elusive quality.

Example 1:
"But she sensed a thread  had been dropped somewhere, the route to some secret heart of this business had been lost"

Example 2:
"Was she some sort of born slave herself, a prostitute in a temple, a hierodule?"

Discussion:
The generalized categorical posits the existence of a class to suggest the membership of the described person, behavior, or condition within that class. In first example, the existence of "some secret heart" ratifies the character's sense "that a thread had been lost somewhere." The generalized categorical need not exist for its descriptive function to work, and indeed it often functions with the reader's express knowledge that it does not.

Consider an slight alteration to "the route to a secret heart of this business had been lost": the switch to the indefinite article moves the sentence into the realm of the actual, rather than the realm of the possible. This leveraging of possibility also invokes a sense of indeterminacy and unknowability; in the above examples, this uncertainty seems at least as important as the specific descriptors.
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Any other thoughts on the Generalized Categorical? I'm also thinking about writing a taxonomy of dialogue formats: with and without quotations marks, with dashes, embedded in to paragraphs, etc. So if you can think of a good example of an unusual dialogue format, I'd be really interested to hear about it.

Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.