Pam Houston's first story collection, Cowboys Are My Weakness, set the tone for her later work and its recurring themes of high adventure in faraway places, looking for love in all the wrong places, mystical visions and great, enduring friendships (with men, women and dogs). Billed as a novel, Contents May Have Shifted is a strongly autobiographical story of an adventurous woman who has a ranch in Colorado and teaches at the University of California at Davis and at writing workshops, but this time around, it's (just barely) possible that her bad juju with men is fixed.
The story is organized, if you can call it that, in snippets of travel essays that skip around the world, from Tibet, Lhasa and Bhutan to Colorado, Mississippi and Wisconsin (and many other locales). Pam is a girl on the move. What she is moving away from this time is Ethan, a world-class, blue-ribbon jerk, with whom she has been on and off for four years. He simply cannot give up other women, and when Pam tells him that she is no longer interested in being one among many, he says, in a brief but devastating sketch of character: "Pam, men in third-world countries treat women so badly, those women actually think I'm treating them well."
The storybook Pam is overdue for a winner, so, undefeated, she shakes off her end-days blues and jumps on a plane. (The real Pam Houston says she has been to 55 countries, all on some magazine or other's dime.) Houston's easy-breezy style is a pleasure to read, whether she's on a nailbiter of a flight, with foam laid down for the landing, or floating on a halcyon river, with foam burbling over the rocks. Whether it's truth or fiction, her candor is a real treat; she can throw in down and dirty sex talk as easily as saying "pass the salt."
One of the recurring characters in Contents May Have Shifted is the irresistible Janine, an acupuncturist, masseuse, seer and sage. Everyone needs a Janine; she finds trouble spots on Pam's person and gently removes them. Sometimes they are concave places, sometimes ghosts; Janine is equal to either task. Janine and Pam's hikes, travels and parties with friends make the reader want to be there enjoying the fun and the landscape with her.
The game changer is meeting Rick, who certainly would not be every woman's cup of tea, but Pam "gets" him; she's even accepting of and affectionate toward his daughter, which is a seismic behavior shift for her. Children have never been part of Pam's life plan, so stay tuned--the contents of her life may shift again. --Valerie Ryan
Shelf Talker: The redoubtable Pam Houston takes us on an enjoyable ride--around the world--the one we all live in as well as her own unusual interior states.