For her part, Muriel feels very drawn to Julius in a way that feels like it could possibly catch fire into betrayal, but may actually be about something else.īoth are trying to make do, to get by, to settle into, but something within them, a sense of dissatisfaction, a hope for more, unnerves them.
Julius enjoys Muriel, but underestimates her as just a silly little thing. Muriel grew up in the shadow of her charismatic mother who traded on her beauty with a string of suitors to make ends meet for her and her daughter. They both carry emotional scars from their times overseas, but Julius also carries a dangerous secret, one that when exposed had gotten him kicked out of the service. Julian and his brother grew up hard-scrabble, trying to make up for their father’s having often given all his money to the church before he passed away. Pufahl’s story follows two main characters: Muriel, a young wife from the plains of Kansas and her brother-in-law, Julius, a drifter and a grifter not long back from the Korean War. That year, Don Larsen would throw what remains the only post-season perfect game in a World Series, My Fair Lady opened on Broadway, and homemakers could buy one of the brand new non-stick frying pans. The year is 1956, when the post-war mindset ballooned with optimism. Which brings us to Shannon Pufahl’s debut novel, On Swift Horses, and its exploration of mid-century tensions in what we now might call queer lives. Hundreds more bombs were being detonated underground, the grand total exceeding a thousand by 1971. Vistas of mushroom clouds filling up the horizon just 65 miles away to the northwest were promoted as tourism by the Chamber of Commerce in Las Vegas which dubbed itself “Atomic City”. From 1951 to 1962 over a hundred above-ground atmospheric nuclear tests took place at the United States government’s Nevada Test Site.
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