Like many who read the stories in Cowboys Are My Weakness, Pam Houston’s 1992 best-selling debut, I identified with the narrators: women who desperately wanted to attract, please, and secure men, so much so that they behaved foolishly. But their foolishness made sense. Houston won over readers (mostly women, I assume) by appealing to them in a certain way—perhaps a new way in books—as a member of the same team. Her characters were fully aware of men’s ways and shortcomings, but still succumbed to their charms. Most women have been in that place, but until Houston wrote about it, nobody had captured it truthfully. Houston’s new book, Waltzing the Cat, shares a few ingredients with Cowboys. Both feature spunky, outdoorsy women who narrate tales of Western adventure and misdirected love. Both benefit from the author’s lively, irreverent style.
Waltzing the Cat
by Pam Houston (Norton, $23.95)
Pam Houston speaks at Northwest Bookfest, October 24 at 3.
Lucy O’Rourke, a 32-year-old single freelance photographer, narrates Waltzing‘s 13 “linked stories” (why it’s not a novel, I don’t know). Her intimate, consistent voice anchors the book. Lucy lives in San Francisco, but travels a lot on assignment for magazines and on various adventures of her own. Lucy’s adventures—leading a river-rafting expedition and sailing into a hurricane in the Caribbean—dominate a couple of stories, and although Houston writes well about Lucy’s physical challenges, I found those descriptions too long and detailed.
Houston covers some of the same terrain in Waltzing the Cat that she did in Cowboys, but she makes two significant leaps: She explores her heroine’s growth and self-realization, and unveils another voice, one hidden in the snappy bravura, that skillfully evokes the enormity of Lucy’s family’s dysfunction. In the book’s title story, she offers memorable and rewarding images, including one in which Lucy observes her father literally waltzing with the cat: ” . . . it is the cat he has lifted high and heavy above his head. . . . He pulls his head away from her and continues to spin, faster and faster, the music gaining force, their circles bigger around my mother’s flowered furniture . . . and now she throws her head back into the spinning, as if agreeing to accept the weight of this new love that will from this day on be thrust upon her.”
At its heart, however, Houston’s writing is about relationships between men and women. No surprise: Lucy has boyfriend troubles. There’s pretty much a new one in each chapter, and they’re all troubled; one is jealous and violent, another’s a wishy-washy commitment-phobe, another’s an alcoholic. Lucy is drawn to them, though she knows better. In “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had,” Lucy confesses the lengths she goes to please and hold onto the jealous and violent Gordon. After losing his temper, Gordon abruptly quashes a planned hiking trip, and Houston’s narrator speaks directly to the reader: “What you’re thinking, right now, is why didn’t I do it, get out of the car without making eye contact, swing my pack on my back and head off down the trail. And when I tell you what I did do, which was to crawl all the way to the back of the Pathfinder . . . and let go with one earsplitting head-pounding scream after another . . . till he told me if I was quiet, he’d let me stay, you would wonder how a person, even if she had done it, could ever in a million years admit to such a thing.” Looking back, trying to explain, she says, “I could tell you the lie I told myself with Gordon. That anybody is better than nobody. And you will know exactly why I stayed in the back of that Pathfinder, unless you are lucky, and then you will not.” Pure Houston, that last line sums up a whole body of feeling. For me, it’s that passage—raw and unflinching—that resonates more than any other in Waltzing the Cat.
Abby Tannenbaum is a writer and book critic in New York.
