Readers Up #20: On Swift Horses
From the liner notes to my ongoing collaborative art concept with Jessica Chapel, The Secret Life of the American Racegoer: “[The term terrain vague] made me think of you and the Stretch and racetracks as potential spaces and places within racetracks that have form but no longer function.” Can I get a holler from my fellow psychogeographers? For place obsessives like myself, racetracks are not only a treasure trove of living (ok, sometimes calcified) history, but also the map to the hoard. Depending on your aims, a map is often more fascinating than gold. Consider Suffolk Downs, now defunct; imagine a day-drunk Bostonian lecturing all who will listen on the wave-like dips and hills of the concrete, his hand moving sinuously to mimic the rushed construction job. Consider the Stretch at Saratoga, supplanting much-mourned sections X-Z, and in the process attempting to streamline the Spa experience into something marketable and above all moneymaking. Consider Hollywood Park, not just defunct but destroyed: Citation’s million-dollar win has little basis in material reality, only in memory and media--notoriously unreliable formats.
American racing resists popular narrative, and American narratives typically have little interest in racing unless a bow-wrapped happily-ever-after is available. It’s hard to imagine Seabiscuit getting greenlit these days; anyway, the true proving ground of any medium is ubiquity, not singularity. In this way, Shannon Pufahl’s debut novel On Swift Horses arrives as a stunning gust of fresh air. An intertwined story in dual perspectives, the book follows Muriel and Julius, in-laws bound more by secrets and yearnings than their common relative. Setting shifts between Las Vegas, San Diego, and the Baja coast; in a salute to racing readers, mid-century Del Mar is both central and tangential to the book, at one point the fulcrum on which the plot turns and elsewhere an everyday backdrop. Not all secrets are illicit, and Muriel’s gradual absorption into the racetrack embraces the notion of the private life, the fundamentally solitary nature of railbirds, the quiet bestowed on the solo racegoer among a packed apron of screaming bettors. For me, a reader not born to the track, the way Muriel learns and moves feels like a gift. Racing and queerness have been entangled from the gate. The eavesdropping, the cadence mimicked after people who know what they’re about have moved out of earshot; the matching of gleaned knowledge to physical evidence, the half-fearful thrill of the first brush through the turnstile, first drink, first bet. Muriel’s experience in 1956 mirrors mine in 2015, the discovery of a gate to forbidden country and then the discovery that there are no gatekeepers.
The first time is a transgression, Pufahl writes. The second is a strategy. She is speaking specifically of Muriel's Del Mar visits, but could just as easily be referencing the trajectories common to queer people. What feels like straying, a transgression, grows in confidence as a sixth sense. Pufahl's novel is many things, but above all a story of essential gambles, sleight of hand and betting against the house and handicapping from every angle and snatching information both hidden and plain as day, all of it necessary to queer women and men in the not-so-distant past and our own present. Julius’s perspective is an inverse of Muriel’s, yet both halves of the story employ gambles and the peculiar codes of cards and horses as analogy, poetry, and plot drivers in pursuit of the true self. If we can learn the new language of the racing form, what other languages might be out there for the speaking? Muriel’s hero journey refers to itself throughout: the cloaked bywords used by queer men in San Diego call back to the horsemen’s vocabulary she picks up at her waitressing job. The celebratory kiss she receives from a fellow female horseplayer at the track foretells her affair with a lone homesteading woman neighbor. As in another classic of belated coming-of-age, On Swift Horses is concerned not only with the moment of awakening, but the reality that we never stop awakening.
A treasure map leads from point A to the final X, marking the spot of reward. Julius and Muriel’s stories are deeply concerned with maps, as Julius drifts across borders in search of his fled beloved and Muriel follows the inadvertent trail laid by the horsemen who frequent her workplace. All great California writing is place-writing; Didion and Babitz, Steinbeck and Solnit understood the state as a map continually rewritten, a sort of Borgesian map that is to scale with its uncharted emotional territory. Julius breaks his own ground, seeding the earth from Nevada to Mexico with clues that he hopes might come back to him. Muriel’s map is written across bodies--her own and her husband’s, those of the men who dance with her in the Chester Hotel and the women whose lives portend something her own might become-- and its treasures are those which hide in plain sight. Wealth is knowledge, in love as in racing, passed between those with shared language. As we say in libraries, sometimes seriously, information wants to be free. The flow of love in a cellar where Julius meets a man he knows and doesn’t nestles against the flow of luck in which Muriel swims at Del Mar. The physical evidence of men’s love shows itself in graffiti, names and hearts, while luck appears in green stacks with near-endless utility. To be recognized, to have words to describe experience, is to be rich. The culmination of Julius and Muriel’s treasure-seeking is a life writ larger, more real, closer to exact, nearer the divine.
But she feels she has invented something, the sensation of big-girl steps taken for the first time, the familiar made alien, an unknown road in a city well-loved leading to that closed circuit. Seeing the racetrack and its denizens serve a larger story is rewarding, as Pufahl is concerned less with one singular big-ticket affair than with the mosaic and continuous reality of horsemen and horseplayers. I’ll always err on the side of the mundane, versus the stellar. Seabiscuit was one in a million, Citation the first to crack a million, but around the country races go on every day. Racing is a micro-sport which is at its most beneficent and rich when experienced through the macro, as a stranger or scientist slicing down to atoms. At base, luck can’t be bucked; the joy of handicapping is in its endless permutations, or maybe in fooling yourself, but in either case there is always something larger at work, impassive as evolution. The great joy of Saratoga sections X-Z was their formlessness, their potential to be shaped to each racegoer’s inclinations, a terra nullius waiting for its cartographers. On Swift Horses is an echo of American racetracks as civic and integral, a love letter to finding new words for ancient realities, groundbreaking, intimate, and hopeful.
Desperately seeking every angle,
Diana