Isn’t It Romantic?

Cowboys Are My Weakness: Stories by Pam Houston.  Norton.  165 pp.  $14.95. ****

“I’d love to give you a great big kiss, but I’ve got a mouth full of chew.”  –from the title story

I rarely pay attention to recommendations from corporate entities, but when Amazon recommended this title and I saw it was stories by a woman, I perked up.  My favorite book in recent memory is A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin, a book which I no sooner finished than I sat down and read it again.  It wasn’t just the excellence of the stories that impressed me, but the searing honesty of the writer, who examined the most painful and difficult moments from her life.  It’s a mistake to assume that fiction is autobiographical, but I can’t believe anyone doesn’t think Lucia Berlin’s stories are ripped from her life.  I’ve never read anything like them.

The stories in Cowboys Are My Weakness are—like Berlin’s—well-crafted and beautifully written.  They hit the literary world with a splash when they were published as a first book in 1992.  Pam Houston has gone on to write various other books, fiction and non-fiction, and to start a nonprofit called Writing by Writers, which gets together around the country to workshop stories.  She has a ranch in Colorado and teaches at the University of California-Davis.

Cowboys does not necessarily seem to be about a particular woman, maybe a cluster of women, all of whom share this weakness.  “How to Talk to a Hunter” is a series of vignettes, a rueful lament about a stagnant relationship.  A sample: “Your best female friend will say, ‘So what did you think?  That a man who sleeps under a dead moose is capable of commitment?’”  Or, “Your best male friend will say, ‘You ought to know this by now.  Men always cheat on the best women.’”  These are funny, but we get the point.  We’ve heard this story before.

“Selway” is something else altogether, about a woman addicted to physical danger and hardship.  The man in this case is so adept at river rafting that he’s always looking for a bigger challenge, finally takes on one that almost proves too much.  I admire his skill, and the woman’s daring, and I see why she’s attracted to someone super-masculine and skillful at the same time, but I also wonder at people who find life exciting only when it involves extremes.  Meditation teacher Larry Rosenberg told a story about the Flying Wallendas, one of whom said in an interview that he only really felt alive on the wire.  He then proceeded to walk a wire stretched across a canyon, and a heavy wind came up, and he fell to his death.

Maybe, Larry suggested, it’s possible to feel alive in less extreme circumstances.

Cowboys alternates this way, stories about taciturn physical men who are great at physical activities but can’t commit, women who match them in physical prowess but would also like them to stick around more.  Or be faithful.

I hit my limit with “Dall,” about a guide for sheep hunters in Alaska.  I’m not entirely opposed to hunting, as long as people eat the meat of the animals they kill.  But the thought of stalking and killing these beautiful animals made me sick.  I’m surprised that the woman who in other stories adores horses and dogs would take part in such an activity.  And the rugged man in “Dall” isn’t just distant, he’s physically abusive.  He doesn’t hit her, she’s quick to say, but throws her out the door into the frigid cold of Alaska.  That’s when this collective narrator moved past a rueful weakness to something that seems like a sickness.

I’m not familiar with women who love cowboys, but I’ve read widely in the Southern literature of women who fall in love with rugged masculine drunks who screw up, then say some version of, I’m sorry, babe, please take me back.  I’ll try to do better.  They’re talking to their girlfriends, but sound like they’re talking to their mothers.  Women love them because they’re supposedly strong, but to me they’re pathetic.

I have to say to the women who write these laments: it’s not true all men are like this.  The men you fall for are, but that’s your problem as much as theirs.  You say you want commitment but it sure as hell doesn’t look like it.  It looks like in your own way you’re as afraid of commitment as the man.

Houston’s narrator seems—finally!—to come to this realization toward the end, when she wonders “whoever taught me to be so stupid about men.”

That story ends this way:

“I listened to country music the whole way to Cody, Wyoming.  The men in the songs were all either brutal or inexpressive and always sorry later.  The women were victims, every one.  I started to think about coming back to the ranch to visit Monte, about another night dancing, about another night wanting the impossible love of a country song, and I thought:

This is not my happy ending.

This is not my story.”

I hate to mention it, but it’s been your story through two-thirds of the book.  I agree that it’s time to move on.