Waltzing the Cat - Softcover

Houston, Pam

4.03

1,680 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671026372 ISBN 13: 9780671026370

Publisher: Washington Square Press, 1999

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Relationships and extreme adventures collide with deadpan humor and female wisdom in Pam Houston's transcendent follow-up to her bestselling Cowboys Are My Weakness. Through eleven interlinked stories, we follow roving photographer Lucy O'Rourke as she survives a home life where her parents engage in rather peculiar feeding rites for the family cat in a "title story that deserves to be anthologized into eternity" (The Washington Post Book World), a near-drowning on a white water rafting trip, and a grand cayman attack in the Amazon. All the while her search for love continues with a string of rugged, exciting, and usually, it seems, inappropriate men. While it's not always easy for Lucy to find success in either the great outdoors or love, she rolls with the punches, never losing her sassy wit. When a surprise encounter with Carlos Castaneda at an airport boarding gate sets off a series of synchronistic events that lead Lucy to Hope, Colorado, and the life she has been searching for, we know that "Houston's triumph is that she has come to know the quieter adventures of the heart" (Arizona Republic).

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Review:

When Lucy O'Rourke was 2 her father threw her into the New Jersey surf. She passed the flotation test then, but nature--wild and human--has been subjecting her to variations on the theme ever since. True, the thirtyish photographer-protagonist of Waltzing the Cat is drawn to dangerous locales, from the Ecuadorian jungle where murderous grand caymans lie at the ready to the Provincetown beaches where her latest nominee for Mr. Right seems only a hair less lethal. But as she has yet to learn, the most elemental struggles begin at home. In the heartbreaking title story, Lucy's classically disconnected WASP family channels all available affection through Suzette, their roly-poly feline (29 pounds and counting!). "The cat and I were always friends until I left home and fell in love with men who raised dogs and smelled like foreign places. Now when I come home for a visit the cat eyes me, territorial, like an only child."

Lucy's survival strategies also desert her when it comes to men. They're trouble when they don't want her, more so when they do. In addition, they're adept at giving the answer "no"--a trait they share with the males in Pam Houston's equally fine first book, Cowboys Are My Weakness. In "The Whole Weight of Me," for instance, Lucy's latest lad yet again eases himself out of things when she tells him she wants to see him soon. "'That would be great,' he said, in a voice that said clear as a bell that it wouldn't. And it was like someone had spliced together the wrong rolls of film from two different movies; it was that instantaneous how everything changed."

A less graceful, less wry writer would not be able to map Lucy's self-conscious journey of discovery with such ease and agility. Houston's adventurer is the sort of woman who runs into Carlos Castaneda after she's just missed a plane.

What everybody says now is, How do you know it was really him, like that is the pertinent question. It was him, I say, like I learned in graduate school, or another man by the same name. I mean, is it less interesting if it was just some guy who thought he was Carlos Castenada, or more?

On the other hand, she's also the type who gets recognized while checking out a display of animal-shaped dildos--"the kangaroo, the rabbit, the great brown bear, noses and ears turned inward, poised at the ready"--in the first sex shop she's dared to enter. Wherever Lucy is, her creator--often in the space of a single sentence--can quickly fill in the most crushing experience with a mix of longing and expertly timed comedy. --Kerry Fried

About the Author:

Pam Houston's collection of short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness, was the 1993 winner of the Western States Book Award, and now appears in eight languages. "How to Talk to a Hunter" was selected for Best American Short Stories (Richard Ford, guest editor). Houston is the editor of the anthology Women on Hunting, and has written the text for a book of photographs called Men Before Ten A.M. She has been a contributing editor to Elle and Ski, writes regularly for Cond� Nast Sports for Women, and has been a guest on CBS-TV Sunday Morning, with "Postcards from Colorado." She lives at an altitude of 9,000 feet in southwestern Colorado.

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