All should know their place and his place is at the top of the pile. He believes in the God-given superiority of the white male over both the African-Americans and women of any colour. John Henry is the old-fashioned Southerner. Henry, who is nine at the start of the novel, can communicate with his mother in sign language. They had one son, Henry, though two older boys had died when they were young babies. John Henry Forge was married to Lavinia, a deaf woman who had been beautiful and came from a good family. That is the way it had always been and that’s the way it was always going to be, according to John Henry, current patriarch. Their main crop was corn, grown mainly for bourbon but also for cattle feed. The rest of the family was moved and they remained there. After not many adventures – no Native Americans attacked them nor did any bears – they got to Lexington and moved on to near what is now Paris, Kentucky, where they settled. The land was in Virginia (which was a lot bigger then than it is now) but he still thought it was too crowded out there so he took a trusted slave and headed West. An ancestor – and all the Forges can name all their ancestors back to him – was given a land grant for his heroics in the Revolutionary War.
The bulk of the novel starts sometime after World War II, though we do get a picture of how the Forges got where they are. Nevertheless, it is a very fine novel indeed, and covers many of the themes needed to become The Great American Novel: sex, marital/relationship failure, sport, racial politics, incest (human and equine), the South (what it is and how it compares to the North), a bit of the pioneer story and that burning desire to be the best or get the best, whatever the cost, particularly if the cost is borne by someone else. And it certainly is not The Great American Novel. Having read, so far, only four other novels published this year, I am not competent to judge whether this novel is the most daring of the year, though I did not find it particularly daring, just fairly daring. Neither I nor, I would hope, any other discerning reader would take their lead from the Daily Telegraph in literary matters so let’s cut to the chase. This book has received rave reviews, with the Daily Telegraph suggesting it was the most daring novel of 2016 and even suggesting it was the Great American Novel.
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