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Love, Sex and Atom Bombs in a Debut Novel of the American West

ON SWIFT HORSES
By Shannon Pufahl

“I did not place my dreams of California inside a long history of dreaming,” Shannon Pufahl wrote in her 2015 memoiristic essay “Interventions.” Something similar might be said of her Odyssean debut novel, “On Swift Horses.” It’s a book about the midcentury American West, gambling and queer love; but it doesn’t follow the plow of stories from any of these territories. Pufahl’s voice is strikingly solid, timeworn but not nostalgic, as she unravels a cinematic story that avoids genre clichés or sentimentality.

“On Swift Horses” begins in 1956, the young newlyweds Muriel and Lee having recently arrived in the suburbs of San Diego from their native Kansas. On the edge of Mission Valley, the Interstate nears completion, and Lee pushes Muriel to sell her late mother’s house so they can afford a plot while the price is right. Muriel produces the thousands to buy the land, but from a different source: her secret horse betting at the Del Mar racing track. Muriel embarks on a conscious awakening in California; in an unmistakably yonic episode of foreshadowing, her new neighbor Sandra gives Muriel her first Mission Valley olive. “The taste is salty and the texture is fleshy,” she notes, “disorienting, but under the saltiness something plummy, rich as jam.” Sandra warns: “There’s a pit.” With some encouragement, Muriel spits it over the porch. Sandra says softly, “You’ve got it now.”

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Lee’s brother, Julius, arrives unexpectedly from Las Vegas, where he’s been living for the last two years, playing the tables and watching atomic bomb tests out in the desert. He’s met a lover, Henry, in the casino attic where they worked surveillance. During Julius’s visit, Muriel feels an attraction to him that’s visceral but amorphous. Julius disappears again to look for the vanished Henry in Tijuana, sending Muriel on her own search for traces of her brother-in-law in the queer haunts of San Diego. There she discovers a world she’s been longing to find, but didn’t know how to see.

After the fast clip of the first section, the novel unfurls in this steady mode of parallel pursuits. It becomes two love stories — neither quite romantic, but rather about twin passions that are both discordant with their time. Julius and Muriel are each other’s shadows, her ventures illuminating her attraction to him as a recognition, a connection that is “without desire or consummation but just as ardent as those things.”Pufahl’s love stories are of the postwar era, but they aren’t intended to reflect it; after sex with Henry, Julius thinks, “sometimes whole minutes later comes the convulsive thud, as if the sound was the sound of time passing and could not be rushed, and only then is the bomb real.” The spaces she creates for her characters — San Diego’s languid Chester Hotel hiding in plain sight, Tijuana rendered as an underworld — have the aura of realms.

“A bluff still has some truth in it,” Julius says, and it’s Pufahl’s extraordinary fidelity to her characters that compels the reader through the book. Lee might lack dimension, but Pufahl has made it clear she doesn’t want to engage the Midwestern man’s California story. The one loose end is a mare Julius brings as a “horsewarming” present, whose purpose, metaphorical or otherwise, never becomes clear — an anomaly in Pufahl’s otherwise tight use of myth and reference.

In journey narratives, the protagonists’ odysseys are often mapped out for the reader, but not for the characters themselves. As “On Swift Horses” shows, the trick is to make the moment “the whole story slips into place” for the character just as satisfying for the reader, even if we knew it all along. “Love was always somewhere outside oneself,” Pufahl writes toward the end, the internal voice implicitly Muriel’s. “It was always improbable. It could happen to anyone and it could happen a thousand times or only once or never.” The revelation at which Muriel and the reader arrive is not new, but it is timeless.

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