‘The Sport of Kings,’ by C.E. Morgan

The first centers on Henry Forge, the dynastic heir who feels the Forge past “residing in him, forming rings in his bones” and who decides, as a young man, to transform the family estate into a horse farm.

Henry’s father, a Latin-intoning, race-obsessed force of nature, considers this a filial betrayal: “a horse farm is really a cheap attempt at dignity … a heap of goddamn rhinestones.”

Henry, in his own way just as brutal and domineering as his father, sets about breeding a Derby winner with the help of his daughter Henrietta.

Morgan shows how easily economic desperation can lead to petty crime, and how easily petty crime can lead, for a young black man, to incarceration.

The novel concludes with an apocalyptic fire and a ghostly presence — an appropriate ending since history and race have haunted almost every page and location within the book: the Forge farm, where young Henry is beaten at a whipping post that had been “seasoned by [the] tears and blood” of slaves in generations past; Cincinnati’s Ohio River, the marker between North and South, “dream, conduit, divide, pawn, baptismal font, gate, graveyard.”

If the plot of “The Sport of Kings” follows the tight logic of tragedy — everything seems pointed to a final, fated end — then it’s an endlessly proliferative novel at the level of sentence and image.

There aren’t too many words; there aren’t enough words; ten thousand books, all the world’s dictionaries and there would never be enough; we’re infants before the Ohio coursing its ancient way, the icy display of aurora borealis and the redundancies of the night sky … the heron, the tern, the sparrow, and the wily peacock too, the peacock turning and splaying his designs, each particular shimmering feather a universe invested with its own black sun, demanding, Look before you die, Look — Don’t turn away for fear you’ll be blind; the dark comes down soon enough.

[...] burn!

Reuben, a black jockey who displays the lightning-fast verbal intelligence of a Shakespearean fool; Henrietta herself, a haunting figure of ravenous hungers — for ideas, for sex, for power.