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# Reader’s Diary: Jaimy Gordon’s 'Lord of Misrule'
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/readers-diary-jaimy-gordons-lord-of-misrule/
- Published: 2016-02-28T13:40:16.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:14:30.000Z
- Description: Jaimy Gordon passed through my field of vision some time in the early 1980s.
- Author: Barry Schwabsky
- Tags: Books, Reader’s Diary, Review, Weekend, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:17 (2016, 2017, part 1)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2016/02/9780307946737.jpg)

Jaimy Gordon passed through my field of vision some time in the early 1980s, having published a book with one of my favorite presses, Burning Deck (which subsequently published a chapbook of mine). And somehow I remember having the sense that there was a bit of a cult about her, but what I read puzzled rather than seduced me. Then she slipped from my view until 2010, when her novel [*Lord of Misrule*](http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/212714/lord-of-misrule-by-jaimy-gordon/?ref=hyperallergic.com) won the National Book Award. This seemed odd enough to warrant investigation, i.e. reading. Although a half-decade has elapsed since then, five years isn’t long for a book to move from my mental to-read list to my night stand. Halfway through the book, I had to post this on Facebook: “I don’t remember being so amazed, sentence after sentence, by a piece of American novelistic prose since, maybe, \[James Salter’s 1967 novel\] *A Sport and a Pastime*. As in that case, I actually find the experience a bit scary — I keep worrying that she can’t possibly keep it up to this level and that later I will be let down. With Salter I wasn’t let down. I’ll let you know how it works out with Gordon.” I can tell you I wasn’t let down, and this despite the fact that while James Salter’s great novel is all about sex, Gordon’s is all about horse racing, a subject in which I have less interest and even less experience. Actually they’re both all about language — Salter’s austere, Gordon’s baroque. Still on Facebook, I got into an exchange with the poet Daniel Tiffany about whether Gordon’s wild vernacular was based more on mimesis or invention. Actually, this was a proxy debate with Gordon herself, given that in an online interview she stated that, in her recent work — as opposed to what I had read way back when — she was “doing realism.” Well, I’d love to live in world where people speak like this: “Young woman, it is a price on everything. Every change make some other change that you can’t see. I know some trainers here never bandaged a horse and they got horses outrun the word of God. When you run against them horses you better have your tap-dancing shoes on” — but I don’t, nor does anyone else outside an Elizabethan theater. Realism? Invention and imitation are almost synonymous. After finishing the book I went on a winter walk on Wainscott Beach on eastern Long Island and found some marvelous shells that had the appearance of being the most extraordinary *trompe l’oeil* depictions of shells. Reality mimics itself so perfectly that only fiction can match it.

*Jaimy Gordon’s* [Lord of Misrule](http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/212714/lord-of-misrule-by-jaimy-gordon/?ref=hyperallergic.com) *(2011)* *is published by Vintage Contemporaries and is available from* [*Amazon*](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307946738/hyperallergic-20?ref=hyperallergic.com) *and other online booksellers.*