That is, more or less, all that happens. Like the lives of its principals, the novel is closely circumscribed. We come to know perhaps four other people, two trucks, one farmhouse, the tobacco field out back, and the mountain that looms up behind—notable for how it, too, restricts the characters’ world, keeping the farm in shadow until late in the morning and making night fall fast. Yet Morgan lifts from that small world an exceptionally beautiful novel. She understands her characters perfectly, and expresses their relationship in ways at once precise and startling. (Aloma, contemplating her relationship with Orren: “It was shocking really, she thought, what all entailed the difference between her and him, as if a whole new person could be made from the sum of that difference.”) And her prose is beautiful and strange and entirely consistent, as if she were writing in the dialect of a place where only she had ever lived.

Aside from the calibre of the mind behind it, “The Sport of Kings” could hardly be more different. It consists of six sections, five interludes, and an epilogue, which together span some two hundred and fifty years, from the Revolutionary War through 2006. It is set mainly in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Paris, Kentucky, the so-called Thoroughbred capital of the world, but its real geographic extent is unmistakably that of America. Some passages unfold in the intimate first person, some in the inclusive, indicting second, and some in the panoptic third, but the over-all narrator remains elusive. Aptly, for a book that is partly about who controls what stories get told, it is not at all clear who is telling this one. And the style is similarly varied. Morgan excels at straight prose—you could carve four or five realist novellas out of “The Sport of Kings”—but she makes use of many other forms: sermons, textbooks, rules, excerpts from other works (real and invented), Socratic dialogues, flashbacks, parables, stage plays. All of that could read like the obligatory kitchen-sinkery of so many postmodern novels, too suspicious of conventional narrative to settle down. But in Morgan’s hands it feels urgent in its ends and sincere in its faith in the power of literature—the resort of a voracious intelligence trying to do justice to an overwhelming world.

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In keeping with that sense of abundance, “The Sport of Kings” has a huge supporting cast: vets, jockeys, farm managers, preachers, deadbeat fathers, deadbeat mothers, distant ancestors, servants, slaves, cellmates, ghosts. But Morgan focusses on three main characters, all of whom we watch grow from children to adults. The first is Henry Forge, scion of one of Kentucky’s oldest and richest families. His mother, Lavinia, is a beautiful deaf woman; his father, John Henry, has savagely antebellum ideas about race and similarly antediluvian theories about women and child rearing. Henry Forge grows up close to his mother but in thrall to the father he despises, and he ultimately inherits his sensibilities. After his wife divorces him, their ten-year-old daughter, Henrietta, is left alone with her father and the Forge legacy. The second major character in this book, she is home­schooled by Henry to protect her from the putatively pernicious influence of integration, and kept too close at hand in other ways as well. Her curriculum includes horse breeding (she grows up to help manage the family farm), while her extracurricular interests run to geology, genetics, and, later, sex: what the earth is made of, what we are made of, what we can make.

Among her lovers is Allmon Shaughnessy, the biracial son of a loving but overworked black mother and a largely absentee father, “known in high school as that fucking Irish fuck.” When his father’s already unreliable contributions dwindle to nothing, and his mother is diagnosed with lupus, a condition she can’t afford to treat, Allmon earns money the only way he knows how: by accepting an entry-level job with the neighborhood drug dealer.

Thus is Allmon undone, less by the vicissitudes of chance than by the forces of history. At the age of seventeen, he is arrested with a stolen car and five grams of crack; by the time he has been paroled, six years later, the observant, thoughtful, sensitive boy has built a fortress of stoicism around his heartbreak and anger. Courtesy of a program at Blackburn Penitentiary, he has also been trained as a groom. In a moment of rebellion against her father, Henrietta hires him. That is how the characters in “The Sport of Kings” eventually converge around a horse: Hellsmouth, spawn of Secretariat, pride and joy of Henry Forge and bane and delight of Reuben Bedford Walker III, who, before the end of the book, is perched on her back, inside the starting gate of the Kentucky Derby.

When “The Sport of Kings” opens, Henry, aged nine, is tearing through a cornfield, trying to escape a punishment he knows he deserves. “Henry Forge, Henry Forge!” someone hollers. Then the narrator takes over: “How far away from your father can you run?”

It is a clever opening, a flashlight shining down the dark road of the story. Where Morgan’s previous novel was about orphans, this one is about parentage—about how far we can get from the familial and social coördinates into which we are born. That makes her choice of subject matter canny. There is no more lineage-obsessed sport than horse racing, and serious aficionados know their begats better than Bible scholars. Morgan’s main characters come pedigreed, too, in a manner of speaking. Although they are our contemporaries, they are defined first and foremost by being either the descendants of slaveowners or the descendants of slaves.

We learn Henry’s story first. The Forge family had already been in Virginia for a hundred years when his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Samuel Forge headed west across the Appalachian wilderness, with one of his slaves, made it through the Cumberland Gap, and became one of Kentucky’s earliest settlers. Subsequent generations of Forges rose to wealth and power via the unpaid or underpaid labor of black Americans, whose exploitation is omitted when the family history is drummed into young Henry. Nonetheless, he is cowed by his ostensibly illustrious lineage, which he refers to only as “It.”

The real “It,” however, is Allmon’s past: a thing without content beyond persecution and loss, simultaneously scary and empty. Morgan recounts it in two interludes separated from the main body of the text, as the enslaved were separated from their families and Allmon himself is separated from his history. His great-great-great-grandfather Scipio, a runaway slave, intended to escape from Kentucky alone but wound up trying to help another runagate, a pregnant woman named Abby, cross the Ohio River. He survived; she died. So scarring was the experience that although he reached the North, he never truly lived in freedom.Allmon has heard none of this, beyond Scipio’s name; unlike Henry Forge, he knows almost nothing of his ancestry. “I am going to find my father,” he declares at one point: