In Shannon Pufahl’s engrossing, melancholy debut novel, On Swift Horses, California feels both scrubbed new and thick with storm clouds ... It’s practically axiomatic that every story set in 1950s America must be a critique of its squeaky-clean surfaces. On Swift Horses is no different. But it does it so skillfully — Pufahl’s prose is consistently lyrical and deeply observant. And her keenest observations are about the secrets we keep ... Pufahl,...is plainly a fan of the fiercest noirs to come out of the postwar era ... She admires the genre’s blend of high and low culture, its sharp-elbowed sentences and neon-lit imagery, its vision of hard-luck off-the-grid lives. Just as important, Pufahl’s prose can run with those icons and at times surpass them ... Metaphors run so thickly over Pufahl’s story that the novel reads as much like a prose-poem commentary on the ’50s as a realistic novel set in it ... That sense of unreality can sometimes make Pufahl’s dialogue ungainly. Her style, so rooted in symbol and lyricism, can make her characters sometimes speak as if they were prophets on a whiskey bender...Pufahl is so committed to the spell she’s casting that her characters’ voices fall under it too ... Yet it’s a remarkable spell. Pufahl embraces noir’s mood while weaving in a love story. She evokes the fear and possibility of life in a new place, with new emotions. She writes with a grace and force that’s rare even among seasoned writers
... [an] Odyssean debut novel ... 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 ... After the fast clip of the first section, the novel unfurls in [the] 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 ... Pufahl’s love stories are of the postwar era, but they aren’t intended to reflect it ... It’s Pufahl’s extraordinary fidelity to her characters that compels the reader through the book ... The revelation at which Muriel and the reader arrive is not new, but it is timeless.
Pufahl’s prose is lush and slow with the romance of emotion and the postwar frontier. Her dialogue is sparse and pointed, every word deliberately spoken. On Swift Horses is a queer Western for an utterly contemporary audience.
... moody, furtive ... [Pufahl] depicts her characters in elegant chiaroscuro, always half sunken in shadows. She is especially good at a form of elliptical poker-table dialogue that says everything except what it really means. The tumbleweed desolation exacts a toll, as well, as the novel is somber and humorless, with long arid stretches in which no one feels any emotion at all.
It is fair to say that, with depictions of casino gambling and quests through the seedier parts of towns, this book won’t appeal to everyone. But to confine it to those images or to paint such scenes with a broad brush that automatically casts them in a negative hue misses the author’s point. Writing in a lush prose that deserves to be savored, Pufahl respects her characters. She illuminates their goals as well as their fears, making each of their decisions understandable to the reader. Their choices might not be wholly appropriate, but given the conditions they face, those decisions are likely the best under the circumstances. That is the author’s point: The conditions of the time did not really allow for those who did not fit the mainstream narrative. She seeks to write them back into the history.
... offers many painful reminders of the damage that repression can do, but it’s also a deep-breathing, atmospheric novel. Pufahl renders postwar San Diego, the characters’ rural poverty and 1950s closeted gay life in careful detail, spinning plain language into beautiful images. Her prose carries hints of other writers who combine the bleak and the hopeful, such as Annie Proulx, Wallace Stegner and Kent Haruf. While the novel’s middle drags a little, Muriel’s and Julius’ journeys are compelling and surprising. Pufahl is a novelist to watch.
Pufahl recreates the mid-century Western world with apt and wonderfully inventive detail ... evocative writing ... The dialogue in On Swift Horses rings with idiosyncratic syntax and is full of personality, wit, and surprising moments of found transcendence ... In this taut and deeply-felt novel, Pufahl’s pioneers of sexual identity are blossoming like a sunrise, but slower.
... engrossing, melancholy ... Pufahl’s prose is consistently lyrical and deeply observant. And her keenest observations are about the secrets we keep ... [Pufahl] admires the genre’s blend of high and low culture, its sharp-elbowed sentences and neon-lit imagery, its vision of hard-luck off-the-grid lives. Just as important, Pufahl’s prose can run with those icons and at times surpass them ... Metaphors run so thickly over Pufahl’s story that the novel reads as much like a prose-poem commentary on the ’50s as a realistic novel set in it ... That sense of unreality can sometimes make Pufahl’s dialogue ungainly. Her style, so rooted in symbol and lyricism, can make her characters sometimes speak as if they were prophets on a whiskey bender ... Pufahl is so committed to the spell she’s casting that her characters’ voices fall under it too ... Yet it’s a remarkable spell. Pufahl embraces noir’s mood while weaving in a love story. She evokes the fear and possibility of life in a new place, with new emotions. She writes with a grace and force that’s rare even among seasoned writers ... And she’s written a historical novel that feels thoroughly contemporary — in the anxiety of the ’50s, she’s found our own.
There’s a boldness of diction and imagery, a stateliness of voice and rhythm, that resembles less the product of an MFA workshop than the cadences of the King James Bible. Pufahl has a story to tell, but she’s less a storyteller than a stylist. That can be a risky thing to be. Style draws attention to itself, and what is attended to can be mocked: for its pretension, for its peacockery ... Pufahl’s sentences, though, unashamedly soar ... Pufahl does what great stylists do: she snatches back experience from the general world, making it sing in all its particularity.
The best sections of Shannon Pufahl’s episodic debut, On Swift Horses, have the terse impact of Larry Watson’s novels and, like them, it’s an intimate portrait of everyday lives that make violent shifts as a result of one fateful decision ... Pufahl creates a potent sense of place even if the time period, the 1950s, never feels right because the language and openly fluid sexuality of the characters don’t ring true. What does register, though, is the dual protagonists’ yearning, which is as powerful and wild as the mustang that Julius presents to Muriel and that gives On Swift Horses its title.
... sad, slow, magnificent ... is worth reading for the poetry alone. Pufahl teaches creative writing at Stanford University, which helps explain how her first novel can be quite so accomplished, but even so the prose is unexpectedly graceful: quietly lyrical and self-assured. Every word is considered; every sentence has a shape. Some passages of description are so well designed that they contain linguistic echoes binding them together, like extended visual rhymes ... in these characters’ cautious balancing of desire and self-restraint — ostensibly forced on them by their place and time, and their particular, 'unconventional' urges — the novel also has something universal to say about the necessary risk of love ... the novel is ultimately a powerful call for precisely that defencelessness: the need to push beyond the guarded edges to open up the heart.
Debut novelist Pufahl’s sharp, gritty details of 1950s San Diego and Las Vegas effectively draw the reader into her protagonists’ struggles to bring meaning to their lives, however different their experiences.
... tender, melancholy ... The glacial plot casts its own spell, wandering around with two beautifully broken souls determined to find meaning — find themselves — in a world that often doesn’t seem to give a damn.
...Pufahl’s gorgeous metaphors and heartbreaking revelations may make readers feel like less is more. Peopled by singular characters and suffused with a keen sense of time and place, Pufahl’s debut casts a fascinating spell. This melancholy story will show up in the dreams of those whose heartstrings it has tugged.
Pufahl presents a vision of the 1950s that is distinctly at odds with the idea that this decade was an American golden age. She reminds us that there has never been a time when women didn’t work outside the home and that, in our nostalgic remembering of that era, we tend to elide the bigotry and oppression experienced by many. More than that, though, Pufahl offers exquisite prose. Her style is slow and deliberate but also compelling because her language is so lyrical and specific ... The book is filled with...rhythmically lovely, splendidly evocative, and masterfully precise descriptions. In these moments, it feels like Pufahl could not possibly have said what she needed to say with any other words.
... powerful ... SoCal’s illicit gay joints, Mexico, and memories of Kansas are finely wrought, though by the time Muriel discovers that the mystery Julius represents actually resides deep inside her own self, Pufahl’s gorgeous metaphors and heartbreaking revelations may make readers feel like less is more. Peopled by singular characters and suffused with a keen sense of time and place, Pufahl’s debut casts a fascinating spell. This melancholy story will show up in the dreams of those whose heartstrings it has tugged.
