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PAIGE WILLIAMS | Lucy O'Rourke, the protagonist of Pam Houston's smart new book of linked short stories, lives behind the viewfinder of her camera. Her life as a successful photographer for "adventure magazines" may pass for just that -- adventurous, even glamorous -- but in many ways Lucy is on the run. She gets involved with selfish, distant men. She vents her frustrations on the wild rapids of Western rivers. She struggles to commit (to herself) by buying expensive pots and pans for her California apartment in the hope that they'll domesticate her. But no. Lucy -- early 30s, single, restless -- is as untamed as the winds and waters she loves.

In "Waltzing the Cat," Houston has created a kind of Earth woman looking for balance, for her place in the universe, "a place where the dirt feels like goodness under your feet." This is a vigorous, often lyrical rendition of a young woman's quiet but intense search for herself. It's an old story, but Houston twists the telling by sending the fearless but terrified Lucy on an untraditional path, one that is typically masculine -- a journey set against the dramatically rugged and unpredictable landscapes of rivers, canyons, mountains, furious oceans and even Manhattan. Houston is convincingly at home in nature, just as she was six years ago in her first, critically acclaimed collection of short stories, "Cowboys Are My Weakness." Her expertise as a river guide and hunter shows in her compelling prose: "I could see the rock in Big Drop 2, dangerously close to the only safe run and bigger than a locomotive, saw the havoc it created in the river on every side. Below it, in 3, (Satan's) Gut surged and receded, built to its full height and toppled in on itself. Bits of broken metal and brightly painted river gear winked up at us from the rock gardens on either side. People said I was good at running rivers and I'd come to believe that they liked me because of it."

Three chapters are particularly strong: "Three Lessons in Amazonian Biology," "The Moon Is a Woman's First Husband" and the powerful title story, about the sacrificial death of Lucy's mother. What little support Lucy feels in her life comes from women friends, including one she barely even knew but who, in the end, changes her life: her grandmother.

The grandmother wills Lucy a remote Colorado ranch -- in a (groan) town called Hope -- and Lucy takes it as a sign, and goes. "My car isn't as full this time as it was the last time I crossed the Great Basin ... People are supposed to accumulate, I thought, as they get older, but I seem to be sloughing off, like a person wrapped in a hundred layers of cellophane, tearing one layer off at a time, trying to get down to me." Lucy learns she's mastered the world but not the most dangerous landscape of all: her own soul. Her biggest and bravest adventure becomes the one within.
SALON | Dec. 18, 1998

Paige Williams is a feature writer with the Charlotte Observer.