《暴政之王（Lord of Misrule）》摘得美国国家图书小说奖

吴学俊

2010美国国家图书奖揭晓

编译｜王   睿

11月23日，第61届美国国家图书奖在纽约曼哈顿颁奖。之前名不见经传的贾米·戈登（Jaimy Gordon）以《暴政之王（Lord of Misrule）》摘得小说奖。著名摇滚歌手派蒂·史密斯（Patti Smith）年初曾成为一时话题的自传《不过是孩子(Just Kids)》获得了非虚构类大奖。少儿图书奖被凯思琳·厄斯金（Kathryn Erskine）凭借《仿生鸟（Mockingbird）》捧走，特朗斯·海耶斯（Terrance Hayes）的《轻率（Lighthead）》则获得了诗歌奖。当晚，每位获奖者都获得一尊青铜雕像和1万美元奖金。
非著名作家解开印数之惑
《暴政之王》是贾米·戈登的第四部长篇小说，讲述了上世纪70年代美国西弗吉尼亚州的赛马世界。戈登在上大学前，曾在西弗吉尼亚的赛马场工作过，她从十年前便开始构思写作《暴政之王》的故事，但却因为没有一家出版商感兴趣而不得不搁笔。成为国家图书奖的新科得主令戈登本人也大为意外，在发表感言时，她带着眩晕的表情连称：“我完全没有准备，真是太让人惊讶了。”
戈登本人是“非著名作家”，她过去的作品都是交给小独立出版社出版，印量有限。《暴政之王》的出版方也是来自纽约的小文学出版社McPherson & Company。对盈利微薄的小出版社来说，出版的书如获得美国国家图书奖这类极具影响力的文学奖项，无异于是被天上的馅饼砸中。但是《暴政之王》却给小出版社出了道难题。
由于入围名单揭晓时，《暴政之王》还未真正上市，McPherson & Co.出版社不得不面临两难的选择：印得太多，需承担退书的风险；印得太少，恐怕会错过大卖的契机。按该出版社的惯例，新书的印数通常是2000册。然而权衡利弊后，出版社老板Bruce McPherson最终拍板，《暴政之王》第一版印量8000册！事实证明，他赢了——仅巴诺书店一家的订货量就超过2000册。自从国家图书奖的获奖名单出炉后，《暴政之王》成为读者竞相追逐的标的。
“朋克教母”一偿文学夙愿
相比手足无措的戈登，今年64岁的派蒂·史密斯早已是聚光灯的宠儿，只不过，她早年征战的不是文学界，而是音乐圈。这个被称为“朋克教母”的摇滚歌手是上世纪70年代女性摇滚的主要代表人物，她于1975年发布的专辑《马》被评为历史上第一张朋克唱片。在23日晚上，她再次成为全场的焦点。
在《不过是孩子》里，史密斯记述了她与身为知名摄影师的丈夫罗伯特·马普尔索普（Robert Mapplethorpe）之间的感情，以及上世纪六、七十年代在纽约的波希米亚式生活, 其中包括与吉米·亨德里克斯(Jimi Hendrix)、詹尼斯·乔普林(Janis Joplin)、威廉·巴勒斯(William Burroughs)以及安迪·沃霍尔(Andy Warhol)等那个时代的风云人物相处的回忆。史密斯与马普尔索普相识于1967年，当时两人都是刚刚20岁，之后共同生活了五年。
实际上，派蒂一直是名文学青年，她从25岁开始写诗，曾经出版过一些诗集，但这本自传是她第一次一本正经的写作。今年1月，《不过是孩子》甫一上市就受到摇滚迷的狂热追捧。如今，文学奖的承认让这位“朋克教母”几度哽咽，在发表获奖感言时，她回忆起自己年轻时在纽约曼哈顿一家书店打工的情形，“我梦想能有本自己写的书，梦想能够写出值得放上书架的书”，她说，“无论科技如何进步，请不要抛弃书。在我们的物质世界里没有什么比书更美丽的了”。
《不过是孩子》由哈珀·柯林斯旗下的Ecco出版，据悉，其中文版权已经由北京贝贝特理想国获得，并计划于明年初在国内上市。
女性超过半边天
在入围今年国家图书奖的20位作家中，有13位是女性，创下了历年之最。在获奖者中，除了戈登和史密斯，摘取少儿图书奖的凯思琳·厄斯金也是女性。《仿生鸟》是部励志小说，讲述了11岁女孩与阿斯伯格综合征抗争的故事。厄斯金曾是名律师，后转行从事写作。《仿生鸟》由企鹅集团旗下的夜莺书社（Philomel Books）出版。
国家图书奖还特设了美国文学杰出服务奖和卓越贡献奖，以褒奖那些在出版事业和文学创新上取得成就的个人。今年杰出服务奖的得主是琼·冈茨·科尼（Joan Ganz Cooney），她是一位资深的少儿电视节目制作人。颁奖人称赞她“为贫困儿童的发展做出贡献”，科尼则表示，现在图书出版业面临最大的挑战之一就是保证儿童在数字科技中受益。“我们努力不让图书在孩子的世界中被电子游戏挤出去。”卓越贡献奖则归属著名记者汤姆·伍尔夫（Tom Wolfe）。■

吴学俊

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2010: It is nearly impossible not to be drawn into horseracing cliches when describing Jaimy Gordon's novel Lord of Misrule, especially since it came out of the pack as a dark horse (there you go) to win the 2010 National Book Award for fiction the same week it was published. It's a novel of the track, and Gordon embraces racing's lingo and lore and even some of its romance of longshot redemption, though she knows those bets never really come in, at least the way you think they will. Her story is set at a backwater half-mile track in West Virginia in the early '70s, the sort of place where people wash up or get stuck or, if they're particularly cruel, carve out a provincial fiefdom. The horses there are washed up too but still somehow glorious, and they're as vividly and individually defined as the people who build their lives around them. Between horse and handler there's a sort of cross-species alchemy that, along with Gordon's gorgeous language and wise storytelling, provides the central beauty of her mud-caked but mythic tale, which Maggie, one of her most compelling characters, comes the closest to describing: "On the last little spit of being human, staring through rags of fog into the not human, where you weren't supposed to be able to see let alone cross, she could make a kind of home." --Tom Nissley

From Publishers Weekly
2010 National Book Award-finalist Gordon's new novel begins and ends at a backwoods race track in early-1970s West Virginia, where horse trainer Tommy Hansel dreams up a scam. He'll run four horses in claiming races at long odds and get out before anyone realizes how good his horses are. But at a track as small as Indian Mound Downs, where everyone knows everybody's business, Hansel's hopes are quickly dashed. Soon his luminous, tragic girlfriend, Maggie, appears, drawing the eye of everyone, including sadistic gangster Joe Dale Bigg. Though Maggie finds herself with an unexpected protector in family gangster Two-Tie, even he can't protect her from her own fascination with the track and its misfit members. While Gordon's latest reaches for Great American Novel status, and her use of the colloquial voice perfectly evokes the time and place, constant shifts in perspective make the novel feel over-styled and under-plotted. And Maggie's supposed charisma clashes with her behavior, creating a feeling that something is missing, whereas Hansel is more witnessed than examined, his character developing almost entirely through the eyes of others, creating uncertainty that often borders on indifference.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
See all Editorial Reviews


http://www.amazon.com/Lord-Misrule-Jaimy-Gordon/dp/0929701836

吴学俊

Of course, LORD OF MISRULE is the name of a horse. It resonates well with anarchy, chaos theory. The splendid dust jacket picture on this novel shows a lone horse and exercise rider coming down the track out of the misty nothingness. How apt for this fine literary horseracing novel, an underdog longshot from a small press but now nominated for the National Book Award.

The book is about one year in the life of typical small-time trainers and backstretch workers. The comparison here with Damon Runyon's fiction is hard to avoid. Jaimy Gordon's characters have names like Tommy Hansel and his girlfriend, Maggie Koderer; the gypsy Deucey Gifford; the veteran black groom, Medicine Ed; Kiddstuff the blacksmith; Suitcase Smithers the stall superintendent; Two-Tie the grifter racetrack tout; and the leading trainer, Joe Dale Bigg. Their horses carry names such as Pelter, Little Spinoza, The Mahdi, Railroad Joe, Mr. Boll Weevil, and of course Lord Of Misrule.

Archetypes or stereotypes, take your pick. Either way, much of this novel rings true with this reader, who began working on the backstretch at age twelve, selling newspapers, and who, as an adult, owned and raced his own horses for many years, sometimes at such minor tracks as in the novel, including Beulah Park and River Downs.

Parts of the book seem like the familiar lyrics an old song heard once again, containing both high comedy and deep insight. Here from this novel is the typical lament of the veteran racetracker, Medicine Ed, no doubt true now and always, but certainly true back in the time of this novel, set in 1970:

"Seem like every day since time he been thinking what a shame and pity it is how the world is coming down, how the pride of work has disappeared, until they just laugh at him, the boys that come on the racetrack now--how the horses is misused and abused, started out racing too young before they bones is hard, not rested proper and dosed with all kind of shots and pills, and so consequently don't last--how these five and dime horse trainers and they ten-cent owners anymore be tighter than the bark on a beech tree, when it come to anything but rush rush rush them horses back to the track and collect a bet. It ain't no real sportsmen round here no more, if it ever was, or either sportswomen. And John Q. Public wasn't no dumber than he used to was, but also he ain't no smarter."

I liked the opening metaphor of the automated hot-walking machine: "the going-nowhere contraption" you can't get around, comparing it to the lost souls of the backstretch life itself, going round and round, saying that "right down to the sore horses at each point of the silver star, it resembled some woebegone carnival ride, some skeleton of a two-bit ride dreamed up by a dreamer too tired to dream."

Rather than using the actual historic names for horses, the author uses proper names that might resonate with her deeper themes. For example, speaking of thoroughbred bloodlines, rather than writing, say, "this was the blood of Man O War," she writes "this was the blood of Platonic," the words of Plato resonating with her twinning of the male and female protagonists, each in search of its other half to make themselves whole again.

I don't have any major complaints, but I do have quibbles. She gives the power to write races to the stall superintendent rather than to the racing secretary. Well, this is fiction. Part of her racetrack vernacular is historic and part of it is obviously the author's own invention, so much of it well done yet her so often repeated use of "go-fer," "goofer," and "gaffer" grated on this reader after a while like Gomer Pyle's drawn out "gol-ley." At one point she describes the chestnut coat of a particular racehorse as whiskey red, and a few pages later compares it to the color of old fire hydrants. She should have stuck with whiskey.

Gypsy was a common racetrack term back in the days when racetrack meetings were short. The self-described gypsy horsemen I knew in the past were always small-time owner/trainers who traveled from track to track like migrant workers and resided lightly in tack rooms and horse vans. It was only their mobile life which made them gypsies. Most caught in this life were, like Medicine Ed in this novel, always hoping to find a place to settle down, looking for a home.

The narrative drive in the opening ten chapters is nicely paced, but after that it becomes a tad disjointed, too episodic, and the book needed its girth tightened in the middle. The narrative picks up the bit toward the end and finishes well.

Over all, this is a damned fine novel. My picks for the very best ten novels of 2010 include such high quality longshots as Robert Flynn's excellent ECHOES OF GLORY, Clancy Martin's amazing HOW TO SELL: A NOVEL, James Hynes's NEXT, and Paul Harding's TINKERS. I wasn't familiar with those announced as nominated for the National Book Award, but now if LORD OF MISRULE should win it, I won't be too disappointed or too surprised.

If you enjoyed LORD OF MISRULE and are looking for similar works expressing the poetry, comedy, and tragedy of racetrack life, I suggest you read Bill Barich's excellent LAUGHING IN THE HILLS, a fine work of creative non-fiction. Also fine are Carol Flakes' TARNISHED CROWN and Jane Smiley's A YEAR AT THE RACES and her novel, HORSE HEAVEN. And if you want to see a first-hand account of what backstretch life was like during the time of this particular novel, see Billie Young's BITS & PIECES OF THE BACK SIDE.