In one of the innumerable wonders of her second novel The Sport of Kings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), C.E. Morgan unleashes one of the most floridly gay characters in 21st-century fiction, a personage out of Ronald Firbank awakened, Rip Van Winkle-style, black and in the wrong century. Reuben Bedford Walker III, who thinks his name is a hoot and immediately does a riff on it, doesn't appear until the final third of the book, but he makes the most dizzying Loretta Young entrance in fiction since Holly Golightly.
In the early days of television, when the contraption was twice as large than the screen, the actress Loretta Young hosted a show in her name, each episode introduced by Loretta herself twirling through the doorway into her tiny office in an extravagant, room-filling gown. It was only a matter of time until gay bars such as the late, lamented P.S. on Polk St. ran videos of her entrances, one after the other, looped. It was like watching Natalia Osipova executing 50 consecutive pirouettes, but far more kitsch and asphyxiatingly funny.
In Morgan's magnificent, transgressive novel about American horse racing (and race in America, among other vaulting themes, though the aromas of the stables are never far off), the author needs a jockey. She invents Reuben, a self-described pederast (his word, not mine), black, sassy and the size of a Lilliputian �" all mouth, really. He's barely onstage before he greets a fellow black character, Allmon Shaughnessy, one of the novel's most tragic figures, with "Hail, fine Ethiope!" The reader sympathizes when Allmon retorts, "How come you can't talk like a normal fucking human being?" Reuben's soliloquies are a tangy gumbo of Shakespeare, the Bible, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, and even if you don't want him to stop, you want him to slow down to a pace you can follow. But Reuben's business is speed.
A small catalogue of Morgan's descriptors of the jockey includes "eight feet packed into four," "a tiny man, but all muscle and trouble," "a bird of prey" and, here Reuben himself speaking, "the devil's midwife, the Messiah come in shape no bigger than a black man's fist in the face of the Kentucky colonel man." But he is saying more than he knows when he declares, "No mother made me. I bore my own damn self." He is Exhibit A in the case of a fictional character outfoxing his creator.
Morgan sets her dazzling top spinning and then has no idea what to do with him, how to add weight to him as a character. You can feel her helplessness in the face of him when, in a stroke of improbability, she makes a shoe flying off a horse running in front of Reuben strike him in the face (in a race he wins, however dazed). In the biggest victory of all, the Kentucky Derby, she brings on a rainstorm that leaves Reuben, again victorious, standing at the side of the track so completely covered in mud he's not recognizable. He's a blowhard, a loudmouth, a troublemaker and a thorn in everyone's side �" but without a hint of sexual menace. It's as if starving himself made him a eunuch.
Over the final pages of the novel float, malodorously, the wavy lines of a hint that Mack Snyder, chief trainer of the thoroughbred and a character developed with the detail of a Duerer woodcut, might also be gay. But if we take "gay" as a state of mind, Morgan's most gay character is also her richest, Henrietta. How's that for an ambiguous name? The daughter of the racing farm's owner Henry Forge, Henrietta could hardly be more het, with only a carnal relationship with her father to brand her a sexual outlier. But for a good stretch of the book, she's sexually insatiable, a predator of men, mostly serially but with genuine feeling for Allmon, whom she brings out of himself and whose child she fatally bears.
When Reuben hasn't got the reins, the author characterizes brilliantly; you think about her people while you're in the shower. Some are ghostly, like an older African-American woman who comes on like Aretha Franklin with her ubiquitous designer purse, sets the entire plot on a new course, then effectively vanishes again.
As with her characters, there's more plot in The Sport of Kings than Morgan can come through on, not that you mind as this extravagant and emotionally wrenching tale unfolds. But plot and character both surrender to language, the unmistakable star of this show. Words pour out of Morgan's mouth with the same prodigality that ropes of drool come out of the gnashing bit-biter of Hellsmouth, the thoroughbred filly at the center of this story, an incarnation of Brobdingnagian monstrosity in this most bred of horses. Hell, as she is affectionately called, is described even more extravagantly than Reuben ("a hurricane in a black barrel"). It's no accident that in her colossal body lies the secret of a Triple Crown winner, "a whale's heart."
The spirit of Melville the moralist and the specter of the White Whale hang over The Sport of Kings like glowering clouds. This book obsessed with lineage links Morgan to Melville, with asides on all things horse-ish and matters no smaller than creation and evolution. Sometimes it reads like Richard Powers on horse steroids and you find it not just too much but, in the inimitable words of Anne Lamott, "just too too." But although Morgan has set her sights no lower than Milton, there's little surprise that her heroine, Henrietta, is female and that her protagonist, Hellsmouth, is also a filly and not incidentally black. Somewhere Secretariat is fuming.