Nox v. Lord of Misrule
presented by
OPENING ROUND
Nox
v. Lord of Misrule
Judged by Andrew Womack
Andrew Womack is a founding editor of The Morning News and the publisher of The Staff Recommends. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “I worked with Teddy Wayne on two pieces he published at TMN last year. My advertorial network, The Staff Recommends, promoted Skippy Dies last fall.”
In Nox, Anne Carson remembers her estranged, deceased brother, combining poetry, prose, classical literature, photos, and handwritten notes, and presenting the work as a single accordion-folded sheet of cardstock laid inside a box. It’s not a novel, it’s not fiction, it’s not even presented as a bound “book.” So how is this a contender in the Tournament of Books?
Upon opening Nox, that’s what I wondered. To read this, you must reach into the box, excavating the pages—which are something like a flattened scroll. The act of reading Nox is therefore an uncomfortable experience. There is nothing easy here—perhaps this is the point.
Nox is basically a collage. There’s no real narrative pulling the reader from start to finish; the tension that draws us through is Carson’s own struggle to assemble an idea of her brother in this way. Carson’s approximation of her estranged brother isn’t fiction, but it’s also not entirely fact, a point she concedes deep inside the work, when she quotes a passage from the second book of Herodotus: “So much for what is said by the Egyptians: let anyone who finds such things credible make use of them.”
The last time my Classics minor proved this useful was for spotting intricate subtexts in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I pulled my copy of Histories from the shelf, and found the full passage, translated here as:
Anyone may believe these Egyptian tales, if he is sufficiently credulous; as for myself, I keep to the general plan of this book, which is to record the traditions of the various nations just as I hear them related to me.
This rendering, I think, communicates Carson’s point more clearly: History is necessarily inaccurate; we only can comprehend it based on the information we receive, and only can relate it to the best of our recollection. It’s a frequent point made by Herodotus, who signs off his seventh book with: “That, at any rate, is the story of what happened.” Translation: Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but that’s what I heard.
Nox is a book about a dead sibling—one whom the author did not know well. It’s a story told meditatively, intimately, and from a distance all at once. Carson makes this loss palpable, and I felt it. By admitting that her book was only as accurate as what she’d heard from his widow, as well as from their mother and what she herself remembers from their childhood, Carson pulled me in headlong. Poring through this scroll, the author’s creative exploration, I felt by the end that I maybe only understood Carson’s brother as well as she did—i.e., not very well—but I came away understanding much more about the faults of memory and the unfinished edges of our relationships.
I reached the end of the scroll and slid the box closed. Even with the book closed, I felt that discomfort again. When the task is to sum up a life, how adept can any of us be? Carson comes to terms with her brother’s death by accepting that she won’t ever know all the answers; sometimes out of chaos comes only more chaos. Nox is a beautiful new look at life and what comes before and after it, and an enrapturing read from beginning to end.
Still, I was wondering, does it qualify as a contender here? I’m still not completely sure. If there were a nonfiction version of the Tournament of Books, I decided, this work wouldn’t fit so neatly in there, either. It’s part-this and part-that, and no one except the author, and probably not even her, can know which are which.
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Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule shows us the dark underbelly of a seedy horse-racing track in West Virginia in the early ‘70s. Gordon populates this lurid world with a cast of trainers, owners, gamblers, and mobsters—all miscreants of varying degrees—and I couldn’t understand a word any of them said through the first full quarter of the novel. I wasn’t familiar with horse-track patois, nor this strange, criminal world, and Gordon offers no signposts.
I dug in more than once, feeling my way through the first 75 pages, trying to hang on amidst the frequent shifts in perspective. This really is the book’s hook—continually tightening the camera on each main character’s motivations, some brought more into focus than others. But it’s also a hindrance, teasing information and cutting a chapter just shy of the nugget we wanted, then trading the perspective to another character. It kept the pages turning, and my teeth grinding.
From a pair of trainer-grifters to the track owners and assorted mobsters, nearly everyone is trying to screw someone else, literally or figuratively. Fittingly, only the gelding is immune to the fray—and even he gets his own moments of perspective, which are actually quite nice.
So I do have complaints about Gordon’s shtick, but without those shifts, I don’t think I would have been hooked into the plot. More than once, I needed one set of characters to explain what the previous group had just done, Gordon’s racetrack patois being so thick. Sometimes this upped the tension, but too often it became my crutch. Still more frequently I became suspicious that her device wasn’t working the way Gordon intended it, and maybe I’d only hacked it to solve my desperation as a reader trying to figure things out.
I found the plot, and I found a groove, but from then until the ending, Misrule flipped course: too much was predictable and satisfying, in the way that what we want to happen—as people who like for good things to happen, who believe in Hollywood endings—does happen. I didn’t want that here. I wanted to taste the grit and grime that was so strongly hinted, yet never arrived. Finally, where was the disillusion? The dark underbelly? I wanted fewer just-deserts, yet Lord of Misrule was too scripted and tidy for far too many pages.
In a battle of devices, Nox would win by using its unique form to connect and communicate a depth of intricacies, where Lord of Misrule falls short with its unrewarding character shifts. But the choice here is for the better story, and on that count, Nox is the more unpredictable, the more gripping—and the one that kept me guessing and still keeps me thinking.
Advancing:
Nox
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
John: If the Tournament of Books is to be limited strictly to imaginative works of fiction, Nox probably doesn’t belong.
Or maybe it does. It’s hard to tell, which is one of the most interesting things about it.
Lord of Misrule, on the other hand says loud and clear, “literary novel,” with its original and arresting prose, the stable-bred patois Womack identifies. As surprising as it might seem for a book from such a small press, (McPherson & Company) to win a big award, Lord of Misrule is sort of tailor-made for such things. The N.B.A. is primarily judged by writers who are also teachers of creative writing, and Gordon’s prose, a recipe clearly of her own, that also makes sure it’s noticed, is the kind of thing teachers of creative writing (and I guess I can include myself in that category) tend to value. It feels different, original, of itself. When you teach creative writing, you spend a lot of time reading work somewhere between not-so-good and competent, often work that looks and operates alike. A book that challenges some of those notions, while still being safely explicable, has a good chance of victory as long as it gets on the committee’s radar.
Gordon’s writing is a pretty neat trick indeed, but I felt similar to Andrew Womack, in that the prose is layered over a pretty conventional story that doesn’t move so much, and tends to cover similar ground in successive waves as we head towards the final race. In the end, for me, Lord of Misrule was a book I admired, but never fell in love with.
I read Nox in a single sitting of under an hour, though “read” is the wrong word. “Looked through,” or “experienced” might be better. I’m one of the now many who reads in both physical copy and digital formats, and for most of the time, and most books, I can’t really say that the digital version alters the experience in any significant way. Regardless of how you’re reading something, often, text is text is text.
But Nox makes a strong argument for its necessity as a physical book. It comes shrink-wrapped, and upon opening, reveals itself to be a box which contains a rendering of a notebook, the pages connected via an accordion fold. The literally continuous nature of the book makes for an unusual sensation as you read, since the pages unfurl from one side and stack on the other. It was almost impossible to stop reading, as the next page was already partially unfolded, reminding you of its looming presence. This is unlike a digital text where you can only assume there’s more behind the next click.
The design made the reading experience immersive and hypnotic for me. The story Carson tells is both allusive and illusive, and some months later from the experience, I only recall the barest of facts. I needed Andrew’s commentary to remind me. I’m not even sure I read all of it, choosing to page through certain passages, but I nonetheless found it emotionally moving, probably close to the effect Carson intended.
As I said, I’m not sure it belongs, but I’m glad Nox is here.
Kevin: I am not by any measure an accomplished horseman. But I grew up in the country, not far from Saratoga. I worked three years for a man who raised thoroughbreds. I read old Red Smith columns for fun, and I still make it to the track every summer where I am inexplicably fond of the trifecta box. The stuff that’s in Lord of Misrule is stuff that I like. The affected style might not be for everyone, but it is for me. And when Jaimy Gordon starts describing an actual race (I think there are four of them in the story), holy cats, this book really takes off. Since finishing it, I’ve gone back a couple of times to read some of the race sections again and they’re just beautiful. In fact, once you get to a race scene, the vernacular in the rest of the book makes perfect sense.
I won’t deny Nox is interesting. But I am also one of those people who will say Nox doesn’t belong in this tourney. Mostly because I am now forced to explain why I prefer Lord of Misrule by a large margin in this match and in doing so, diminish what Carson has accomplished.
Nox is intensely personal—so personal, in fact, that it’s kind of shocking it was commercially produced at all. I quite enjoyed the 45 minutes or so that I spent with it. The object (is it even a book?) is beautifully designed. But it was much more of an aesthetic experience than an emotional one. I certainly felt Carson’s pain in losing her brother. I can’t say that I ever shared it, though. And that to me is the difference between Carson’s wonderfully packaged poem (I guess) and a fully realized novel. Carson’s attempt to reconstruct the life of a person I don’t know through the disjointed memories of other people I don’t know and adding up to not very much, never “pulled me headlong” as it did Judge Womack. As someone who took three years of Latin, I was more engaged with the Catullus poem that Nox translates slowly, word for word throughout the text.
But Carson didn’t ask anybody to compare her work to a bunch of novels. I think it’s pretty good at being what it is, it’s just difficult for me to say exactly what the is is. Like you, I’m kind of glad it exists, though. And to the extent that it’s mixing things up in the ToB, I’m all for that. Predictability is death, John. Hooray for Nox!
Tomorrow James Hynes’s Next meets So Much For That by Lionel Shriver, which could set the table for a possible Next-Nox matchup in the quarterfinals. We shall see.
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