In the everybody loves an underdog department comes the winner of the National Book Award for fiction.

Dig this belated review in the New York Times by Janet Maslin:

Ms. Gordon began her serious writing career in 1963, at 19. She wrote a linguistically quaint parallel-universe novel, “Shamp of the City-Solo,” that appeared in 1974. Regarded by some as an underground classic, it had fallen into relative obscurity by the middle 1980s, when Ms. Gordon discussed it in a long interview with Gargoyle Magazine. Gargoyle is the sort of publication that has ardently scrutinized Ms. Gordon’s work over the years. More mainstream ones, like The New York Times, have managed barely to notice her at all.

So how should her win be understood? Should it be seen as a general triumph for small-press authors (Ms. Gordon’s publisher, McPherson & Company, which has championed her work for decades, remains a company with a post office box for a mailing address), or as a full-blown, legitimate recognition of 2010’s best work of fiction? Perhaps “Lord of Misrule” would not be so startling if Ms. Gordon’s other books had been more widely read. But this novel is so assured, exotic and uncategorizable, with such an unlikely provenance, that it arrives as an incontrovertible winner, a bona fide bolt from the blue.