Indian Horse
by Richard Wagamese

Indian Horse: Style 1 key example

Style
Explanation and Analysis:

Indian Horse is a novel with the marks of poetry—rich, lyrical sentences charge the story with feeling. Varied and shifting, Saul’s prose does what his skates pull off on the ice. At some points, the novel plods with short, deflated sentences. “My body feels stronger. My head feels clear. I eat heartily,” he notes at the story’s outset. At other moments, it struggles to keep in all the emotion: “Even now when I think back to that day, I can see the shimmer of the wake they left behind them, the vee of it and the divergent lines that lapped at the shoreline.” The novel’s dynamic sentences control the pace and tempo of its storytelling.