It becomes two love stories - neither quite romantic, but rather about twin passions that are both discordant with their time. Sandra says softly, “You’ve got it now.”Īfter the fast clip of the first section, the novel unfurls in this steady mode of parallel pursuits. “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. 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. Muriel produces the thousands to buy the land, but from a different source: her secret horse betting at the Del Mar racing track.
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. “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. Pufahl’s voice is strikingly solid, timeworn but not nostalgic, as she unravels a cinematic story that avoids genre clichés or sentimentality. “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.
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