Bloodstock: Overbred, Overwritten 
 C. E. Morgan can do some things supremely well. There is a scene about a quarter of the way through her new novel, set mainly on a Kentucky horse farm, where a stud stallion is brought in to cover a brood mare. The bringing together of two highly-strung animals, attracted by scent, and as likely to attack their handlers as each other, is a scene of gross violence made almost magnificent by the wildness of the writing in which Morgan describes it: 
 The enormous bay stallion rounded the wall of the breeding shed between his two handlers, his tremendous bulk eclipsing much of the early sunlight and casting the shed into abrupt shadow. As soon as the pliant musk of estrus reached his nostrils, he sank into his quarters, the muscles of his flanks trembling spasmodically, the phallus beginning to protrude from its sheath. His dished head traced small circles in the air as he eyed the mare. She, in turn, twisted away from the trammel of the lead shank to find him, her nostrils widening as her hooves danced on the tan-bark floor. 
 The scene, which takes six pages in all, is absolutely central not only to the working world of the book but also to its theme, which is the breeding of bloodstock, whether animal or human. Against all custom, the owner, Henry Forge, insists on being present too, further ratcheting up the tension. And he uses it as a lesson for his teenage daughter, Henrietta; that too is central to the theme. 
 Contrast a parallel scene, symmetrically placed in the later part of the novel. This is a birth--not the mare delivering her foal (though we see that too), but a human labor. It is not the actual scene I want to quote, but something from the dozen pages leading up to it, a bubbling cauldron of nightmare fantasy, history, philosophy, and brute realism [Warning: this quotation contains obscenities]: 
 Back in the halcyon days of her ignorance, her monthly period had been only a nuisance. Her pussy like something she had invented--sui generis. There's no business like my business! But, pregnancy shattered the illusion like so much cheap mercury glass. What differentiates man from animal is deferral of appetite. And here was the real silver that turned the blood blue: Each menstrual period was a bright reminder, a clotted reminder, a libation to the gods on behalf of every child unborn, those quietly waiting in the hidden place where the waiting gather. Woman was a tensile thing stretched taut between generations. So no fucking was casual and, further, there was no such thing as a free body in this world, our occasional choices laughably, infinitesimally rare. Each was born squalling and covered in blood with a bill coming due in her clenched hand, her tiny ovaries constellated with potential life, floating there in the warm, watery dark. The world, in fact, existed. 
 I have two reasons for quoting this scene; for now, I want to talk only about style, the flights of wild fancy that Morgan embarks on here and countless times elsewhere. She can certainly write, she knows she can write, and even when she mocks her tendency to overwrite, she does so with conscious pride in her own virtuosity: 
 Or is all this too purple, too florid? Is more too much--the world and the words? Or do you prefer your tales lean, muscular, and dry, leached of excess and honed to a single, digestible point? Have I exceeded the bounds of the form, committed a literary sin? I say there's no such thing--any striving is calcined ash before the heat of the ever-expanding world, its interminability and brightness, which is neither yours nor mine. 
 I almost abandoned the novel in its first pages, wondering if I could take the continued onslaught of overcolored epithets and baroque phrasing. But I persevered, and discovered that when the drama in her story is natural and organic--no matter how intense, as in the breeding shed--Morgan's language mostly keeps pace with it. For me, the strongest of the six parts was the third, the only one not set in Kentucky at all, about the coming of age of a black boy in Cincinnati in the 1990s. So real were his problems in losing his preacher grandfather, trying to care for his sick mother, and stay on the right side of the law, that the story needed no special help from the words; text fitted content like a glove. And even when the purple passages resumed, I recalled that other great writers whom I admire--William Faulkner, for instance--also used highly charged language. But Faulkner did it for a purpose, to give his writing epic scope, commensurate with the history of the American South and the original sin of slavery. Does Morgan have such a purpose too? 
 Yes, but it seems forced. The dozen or more pages of extreme writing leading up to that birth scene are there because the situation itself is extreme. Without giving away the plot, let me only say that no one knows whose child this will turn out to be. Of the two main possibilities, one is socially beyond the pale and the other is morally outrageous. Here again, I almost threw down the book in disgust--not at the behavior of the characters, but that the author would so blatantly engineer the situation to make her thematic point, and jack up the language so that the obscene would seem epic. She is no longer concerned with character and plausibility, but with the troubled history of a people, race, lineage... bloodstock, in short. Faulkner might have handled it, or Steinbeck in his melodramatic 
 East of Eden 
 mode. Morgan is not in their league, though you can see her trying to be. 
 Nowhere did the fundamental contradictions in the novel emerge more clearly than in the last 150 pages. There continue to be many exciting set-pieces for sure, including horse-race scenes that make even this non-aficionado rise to his feet in the stands. And the short final part contains moments of simple grace, as the baby changes the life of his grandfather in beautiful ways. But overlaid on it all is the sense of the author grabbing at the organ stops almost at random, to build a great crescendo out of words, words, words: 
 I am 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. Drawn darker than a stub of burnt cork, he straddles the black brain as it sleeps awake. His silks are sound from the pickers' jubilee; the fine helmet of the overseer's skull; reins from the braids of white bitch bitties; black boots from the flays of baying blackwater hounds; his crop snatched from the Southern whipping hand, its handle fashioned from fingers that when felled, grabbed up Mississippi mud like velvet cake. 
 And so on for forty lines. Sound familiar? It is in fact a version of Mercutio's Queen Mab speech from Romeo and Juliet in the voice of a gay jockey drunk on his own words. But the transposition is more than showing off. It is part of Morgan's insistence that this is a Great American Novel about the most shameful subject of all, race. Although actually spanning only the lifetime of one man, Henry Forge, it has the referential scope of an epic, beginning with the first settlers coming over the Wilderness Road through Cumberland Gap. It takes in the legacy of the Civil War, the Underground Railroad, urban poverty, police and prison abuses, and the 2001 Over-the-Rhine riots in Cincinnati. It even retells the story of Adam and Eve, with further reference to Cain and Abel, Ham, and Ishmael. I understand that Morgan wants this to be a big book, but the further she goes to prove her point, the further she gets from the natural working-out of her story in terms of character and human feeling. It works so long as you keep believing in the grand manner. But once you lose that belief, forget Faulkner; the novel's plunge into total tragedy at the end will just seem like the arbitrary melodrama of Southern Gothic at its worst.