Lord of Misrule

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction recently, Lord of Misrule is an odd book. It isn't so much that the setting or the story arc are unorthodox; the story is set in a broken down horse racing world on the east coast and populated by characters with names like Medicine Ed and Suitcase. What makes the novel unusual, at least in contemporary fiction, is the narration. Where dialogue is concerned, dialect or vernacular has long been acceptable and at times preferable. But in narration, the deal with readers has always been that authors would revert to standard English usage. This is not the case here. The narration is rendered in half syllables, run-on sentences, and dropped suffixes. As well, the dialogue traffics in the relatively modern convention of not using quotation marks. I'm not sure the work isn't influenced by the style of Cormac McCarthy or Mark Twain.
In his slim treatise on the relationship between readers and writers, B.R. Myers, takes to task the new lords of fiction, criticizing McCarthy, Don Delillo, and others for their ventures into the ridiculous. I keep wondering what Myers will have to say about Lord of Misrule. I keep wondering what average readers will have to say as well.