Jaimy Gordon

My brother-in-law is a racetrack jockey. My sister-in-law exercised racehorses before leaving the track to teach. I worked as a bi-lingual clinical social worker on the backstretch of the Chicago-area racetracks for 25 years. I serviced horsemen and horsewomen ranging from trainers, assistant trainers to undocumented hotwalkers and grooms. Exercise riders and agents included those I served. I found Jaimy Gordon's novel, based on her one summer working on a racetrack as teenage groom decades show more previously, patronizing and insulting. Those from the track I know who read her novel concur. The folks who populated her novel came across like carny side-show novelties. Those of us who worked on the track for decades are not novelties. If ever there was such a thing as cultural appropriation by an author who extracted fame and money and awards (unbelieveably, the National Book Award given to this novel) from a subculture she had almost no meaningful contact with, we have it here. The fact that the National Book Award was given to a novel both mediocre and patronzing belies the reality that too often a talent for self-promotion transcends any talent to honestly reflect reality. In war, we have called it, "Stolen Valor," claiming an undeserved heroism. The many brave and hardworking horsemen and horsewomen wherever they work in the hierarchy of the backstretch racetrack deserve far better than this condescending appropriation of their lives. show less

Indian Mounds Down, is a rundown amateur racetrack, in West Virginia, circa 1970.
Everything in this ramshackle place is broken or about to be, populated with hot-walkers, grooms, jockeys, trainers and third-rate gangsters, all christened with names like Deucey,
Medicine Ed, Two-Tie and Kidstuff. The line between these misfits and the brokedown horses they live for, blur again and again.
The author presents this world in a unique language, full of slang and verbal shortcuts, doing away with show more quotations and some punctuation, so it flows like poetic grunge. This makes for some difficult reading, but there is beauty to the prose and at times you can smell the dust and horse sweat, emanating from the page.
“An hour before Little Spinoza’s first race they sat around in a funeral mood-all except Little Spinoza who stood in his bucket of ice as cool as a Tiffany cocktail stirrer, dreaming in black jewelry eyes of emerald alfalfa and clover of Burmese jade. He had miraculously regained his innocence as they had all lost theirs.”
I can see why this National Book Award winner, has divided readers. It’s not an easy read but I find my problems with the narrative, a deficiency in me and not in the writing. If you are up for the challenge, I think the rewards will be yours. show less

Sheesh! Where to begin? How do you boil down, summarize, explain or critique a story as big and complex as SHE DROVE WITHOUT STOPPING? It's a novel that is so unique it seems to defy easy comparisons. Jaimy Gordon has created, in Jane Turner, a character to be admired and pitied simultaneously. Because she is without question a victim, but she adamantly refuses to be a victim. Does that make sense? Probably not, but there it is. I'll try to explain this, but probably won't succeed.

SHE DROVE show more WITHOUT STOPPING is essentially Jane's life story, or at least the first 21 years of it. She is the middle child (there are two sisters who remain minor characters) of a successful corporate lawyer who dotes on her for the first eight years of her life. Indeed there appears to be a pattern of inappropriate squeezing, groping and fondling on the part of the father, Philip Turner. And if there is one particular villain in the story it is the philandering father, referred to by even Jane as simply "Philip Turner." Jane's mother is something of a basket case who makes regular visits to her analyst, Dr. Zwilling, while attending to her daughters in a more or less robotic fashion.

Confused by all the fatherly groping, Jane is nevertheless devastated when her father ceases to lavish attention on her and even begins to act as though he hates her and finds her repulsive. Jane's puberty and junior high and high school years are a tortuous horror for her. (But hey, isn't it for all of us, come to think of it?) But packed off to the unusually liberal "Harmonia College" in rural Ohio, Jane finally busts loose, buying a car and moving off campus and making friends with a rather grotesque group of locals, including Willie D. Usher, the Soul of Commerce; Felix the bartender at the Downtown Rec Club; Fred Blood the grocery clerk; Officer Rollo the local constable; unemployed actor Roger O. Booth (aka Albert Huzzy), who is the friend (camp follower) of California golden boy artist Jimmy Fluharty. Jane is smitten almost immediately with Jimmy and they move into an abandoned farmhouse together and spend a lot of time making the beast with two backs as well as other sexual shapes. Jimmy seems to be a person who loves himself more than anyone else, but Jane doesn't care - there's unquestionably a lot more lust than love in the relationship.

But RAPE intervenes, and, finding justice not forthcoming, Jane flees, first back home to Baltimore where her parents are in the middle of a bitter divorce. So she hits the road in her "moneygreen Buick" for further misadventures. The secondary and primary roads west seem a lot like Huck Finn's Mississippi - filled with more characters, more "adventures." And when she hits Los Angeles and joins up with Jimmy again, another whole cast of grotesques assemble - Cochise and Mama, Billy and Marie, Raymozo the Rayman, and even Dr. Zwilling turns up again, transplanted to the west coast as a new-age therapist.

Like I said at the beginning, this is a really BIG book, bigger even than its 390 pages might suggest. There is a whole life in here, Jane Turner's life, and how she interacts with an enormous cast of well-defined characters. Jane is highly sexed, confused and, most of all, ANGRY, although she's not quite sure why. Because, as she states more than once, she began life as an extremely happy baby. Her subsequent family life, however, is a horror, and things continue to get worse as poor Jane is alienated, humiliated, raped and scorned. (A sequence of events that left me feeling faintly guilty just for being male.) And yet, fear not, because at the very end there is the hint of a kind of redemption and freedom. And hey, if we're lucky, maybe even a sequel. The book is twenty years old now, and I can't help wondering how Jane's life turned out. So yeah, maybe a sequel would be in order. It's a BIG book, a LONG book, but by God - and pardon my cliche - it is "gripping human drama." Jaimy Gordon knows how to tell a story. And SHE DROVE WITHOUT STOPPING is a darn good one. show less

This is definitely not one of your big-gulp novels that you can plow through, but requires that you take your time and give it the attention it deserves. This is a book that rewards you for giving yourself over to it -- the book is the boss here. I guess not for nothing is there that little S&M subtext. The language is nicely done and the whole narrative is really rich, loamy, like you could grow things in it. Reminds me a bit of Suttree-era McCarthy, although not quite as mad-genius, mixed show more up with some vintage Damon Runyan and filtered through a female -- but not necessarily feminine -- sensibility. I very much like the line it takes between the cast of ne'er-do-well humans and good animals -- love of horses is not necessarily something I associate with racetracks, but Gordon does a good job of painting the nuances and attractions. Very well done. show less