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Sep
08
Book Review: Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston
2008 at 9am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
This book was a bit of a departure for me. I love short fiction, but I’m not much for stories about women and the men they hope to wrangle. However, this nice little collection came highly recommended from a trusted bibliophilic friend, and I figured it never hurts to expand your horizons, right?
Cowboys Are My Weakness is Pam Houston’s first collection of short fiction, and it was originally published in 1992. The twelve stories contained within these 171 short pages feature strong female charactes who struggle to love men who are untamed and untameable. These are not quite romance stories— though they feature love and sex—and they are not quite chick lit (they’re more literary than that), but they are absolutely wonderful and wholly enjoyable. I read them in one sitting and found them to be a perfect diversion for a hot, sunny summer afternoon.
The stories begin with “How to Talk to a Hunter,” which I loved instantly because it is written in second-person. You don’t encounter second-person narratives very often, and I think it’s because the second-person point of view is much more difficult to write. Instead of telling the reader what the characters are experiencing, the author must tell the reader what he or she is experiencing, and so must be able to write broadly enough for many readers to be able to imagine themselves in the scene without sacrificing the quality of the prose. It’s a tough task, and Pam Houston is clearly up for it. “How to Talk to a Hunter” is written to a woman who is falling for a man she cannot have, at least, she can’t have him all to herself. A few of my favorite lines:
He’ll say you are always on his mind, that you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to him, that you make him glad that he’s a man.
Tell him it don’t come easy, tell him freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
Now, check out her ability to capture those turning-point moments in a relationship:
A week before Christmas you’ll rent It’s a Wonderful Life and watch it together, curled on your couch, faces touching. then you’ll bring up the word “monogamy.” He’ll tell you how badly he was hurt by your predecessor. He’ll tell you he couldn’t be happier spending every night with you. He’ll say there’s just a few questions he doesn’t have the answers for. He’ll say he’s just scared and confused. Of course this isn’t exactly what he means. Tell him you understand. Tell him you are scared too. Tell him to take al the time he needs. Know that you could never shoot an animal; and be glad of it.
Houston uses second-person again in “Sometimes You Talk About Idaho,” in which a woman in her late twenties allows her father to set her up on a blind date with one of his friends. The date goes swimmingly, and the gentleman–a cowboy, the character’s favorite type of guy–even calles her a “swell critter,” but she doesn’t hear from him for a few days and begins to wonder. Isn’t this beautiful?
You wonder why there’s no word for the opposite of lonely. You wonder if there’s a difference between whatever might be truth and a performance that isn’t a lie. In your life right now, you can’t find one.
“Highwater” presents the story of best friends who are in very different relationships with very different men. Casey has found Chuck, a freethinking musician with a restless soul, while Millie dates Richard, a blueblooded Texan who can’t let go of Karen, his last lover. This prompts Millie to count Richard’s condoms before and after his visits to Karen, which is a detail I just loved. Casey and Millie struggle through complications in their relationships, and Houston skillfully explores the reasons many women allow men to treat them poorly. She gives us strong female characters who are weak when it comes to men—who are attracted to the wrong types of men, the rugged, restless ones who won’t settle down—and she shows us how they live and learn and move on when it’s all over.
As Millie summarizes a conversation she and Richard had about gun control, she tells Casey,
He said even if I was already dead and he knew who did it, he’d kill them. Even if I was already dead.”
Casey shook her head.
“I think in Texan that means ‘I love you.’”
In “For Bo,” a woman deals with the discrepancy between her mother’s idea of what her life should be and the reality of what it is, as she’s married to Sam, who says their gravestones will read, “They never had a lot of money, but they always had a lot of sex.” Of all the relationships presented in Houston’s stories, this is possibly the healthiest. It stands in sharp contrast to “Dall,” in which the main character accompanies her boyfriend, who is a hunting guide, on a long trip to Alaska, during which they fight like cats and dog whenever they are alone. She realizes that
“Right from the beginning, my love for Boone was a little less like contentment and a little more like sickness.
This could be said of many of the relationships Houston presents in Cowboys Are My Weakness, and it makes for great fiction.
In the title story, the main character begins by describing the picture she has in her mind of the perfect life:
A tiny ranch on the edge of a stand of pine trees with some horses in the yard. There’s a woman standing in the doorway in cutoffs and a blue chambray work shirt and she’s just kissed her tall, bearded, and soft-spoken husband goodbye. There’s laundry hanging outside and the morning sun is filtering through the tree branches like spiderwebs. It’s the morning after a full moon, and behind the house the deer have eaten everything that was left in the garden.
This woman for whom cowboys are a weakness struggles to reconcile the painting in her head with the reality of her life, in which it’s hard to find a good man, much less a real cowboy, especially because when she does meet a man who is “sensitive, thoughtful, and kind,” she knows that he is”the kind of man I always knew I should fall in love with, but never did.” As soon as she gives up on the wrong man, he begins showing more commitment, and she remarks knowingly:
I suppose one of life’s big tricks is to give us precisely the thing we want, two weeks after we’ve stopped wanting it.
These are just a few examples of Houston’s insightful, intelligent writing, which still rings true sixteen years after its original publication. The stories in Cowboy Are My Weakness flow together very nicely, as the strong female characters become progressively healthier and more self-aware. Every character grows or learns something important, and they gradually become less needy and apologetic and more in control of their lives and relationships. These women recognize their weakness for rugged, outdoorsy men who won’t be tied down, and they either decide to take the bad with the good or get on the road to something new and better. One character, in the final story “In My Next Life,” even ponders a lesbian relationship, as she is “tired of trying to bridge the unbridgeable gap…ready to hold and be held by somebody who knows what it means.”
It would normally irritate me to no end to read about strong women who fall apart and make poor choices about the men in their lives, but Houston’s writing was compelling and believable, and I couldn’t really fault these women for choosing the men they did. I think most women will recognize themselves somewhere in these stories, which are written about and for real women, and which are solid proof that fiction about women doesn’t have to be women’s fiction or chick lit. The love scenes are steamy without being salacious—they’d definitely be good company on a rainy afternoon or cold winter’s night—and Houston’s characters, as they fall for the wrong men for the wrong reasons, are delightfully flawed and wonderfully human. I give Cowboys Are My Weakness an enthusiastic 4.5 out of 5 and strongly recommend it.
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[...] Read the rest here: Book Review: Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston [...]
Great review. Very insightful. I am not a big fan of short stories but I’d read this based off of your review.
Sounds interesting!
I read this when it first came out – loved it. Sure, Houston has some formulas in her stories, but I still think she is one of the better writers in Western fiction these days.
[...] Sighs and was happy to be snuggled on the couch with Pam Houston’s Cowboys Are My Weakness (here for my review). I was also basking in the glow of a wonderful post from Elizabeth Emerson [...]
[...] Houston, whose book Cowboys Are My Weakness I reviewed here, opens the collection with a fantastic piece entitled “Not Istanbul,” which is written [...]