The sumptuous color and depth of description strengthen our understanding of Julius’s daily angst, Muriel’s quiet power and Lee’s willing blindness. The stylistic and arresting prose plays as much of a role in this exceptional story as the drama. Meanwhile, Julius meets Henry, the love of his life. She’ll still have the house and her own money but she is giving up something more crucial and her mother would have seen that. She tries to imagine what her mother might think of this deception and she can’t. Muriel sees the house where she grew up as her oasis. Like Julius, Muriel uses deception as a means of self-preservation.Įventually she gives Lee her racetrack winnings for the new house, but she intensifies her marital lies by claiming she sold her mother’s house in Kansas to get the money. Both secrets indicate intention for something else, a pull toward an unconventional truth. She appears to be the archetypal June Cleaver, but we know she’s not by her incognito betting activities at the racetrack and also by her refusal to sell her mother’s house in Kansas, which would pay to build Lee’s dream house. Muriel, “orphaned and alone” after her mother died, married Lee and moved to California without loving him. She wrote to Julius about her gambling, but Julius ignored her confession. Lee’s simmering suspicion vacillates between bitterness and worry, and Muriel’s yearning for acknowledgement becomes resentful.

With subtle exactness, a low-level frustration hovers over Julius’s cagey absence, as it disrupts the happiness of the young married couple. Lee and his brother Julius had planned to build that house together, after their service in the Korean War, but Julius now prefers Las Vegas, where he can disappear into the shadows, gambling and picking up men. She hides her financial triumph from her husband Lee, who dreams of owning a suburban house. Muriel takes what she hears to the racetrack where she consistently wins, raking in thousands of dollars. They talk as men do, confident and gently adversarial about the coming race day, the horses off their feed, the jockeys with tapeworm, the cup and feel of the track. Every weekday they come to the bar, retired trainers, bookmakers and ex-jockeys. She eavesdrops on gambling horsemen calculating their bets to place at San Diego’s racetrack. To start, we meet Muriel, a waitress at the Heday Lounge. You’ll not soon forget the author’s gorgeous prose it evokes a tremendously powerful melancholy that sings not alone with the sadness and isolation of lost souls, but also with the hope of release. Atomic bombs are tested in the empty desert beyond Las Vegas, and advancements in color television, suburban housing sprawl and freeway development all hum with progress in the background. This memorable story about gambling, the American West and queer love takes place in the late 1950s.

On swift horses a novel