Reassessing her life off the leash

Fenton the Irish wolfhound isn’t the smartest of dogs, nor the slowest, but he could be right up there among the friendliest.

His owner, author Pam Houston, is taking him for a walk this morning along “the Ditch,” an agricultural drainage channel that runs like a moat between groomed neighborhoods and the Central Valley’s endless farm fields. A few minutes earlier, Fenton had engaged in a little sniff-and-touch with a black dog half his size that ended with a sharp snarl -- surprising Fenton, who seemed to think the momentary friendship was progressing well.

Now, the unleashed dogs are on their return routes and Fenton bounds over to greet the other animal, oblivious to the rejection and snap of violence just minutes ago.

In this moment, master and pet could not be more different. Whereas Fenton cannot hear the echoes of experience -- and maybe spare himself an unnecessary nip -- Houston can’t stop listening, a theme that courses through her latest book and first novel, “Sight Hound,” due out Jan. 24.

For years, Houston’s relationships were hobbled by the emotional legacy of a father’s fast hand and a mother’s sharp tongue. Her drive to escape herself propelled her around the world, through deadly class-V river rapids in southern Utah to the kingdom of Bhutan in the heart of the Himalayas, across the icy crevasses of Alaska’s North Slope and onto the wild plains of southern Africa.

Yet she always was running from, rather than to, something.

“It’s about otherness from here,” Houston says, defining her favorite destinations as either wilderness or isolated societies. “How little those places resemble the place where I grew up, which was a place of great unhappiness for me.... I’m so much happier in motion and in the presence of the unfamiliar, than I am in the presence of the familiar.”

Wanderlust is a disease hard to cure and Houston’s case has only gone into remission. She hasn’t been to Bhutan, one of her favorite spots, since getting married three years ago, and misses it. She thinks the marriage -- it is her third -- works mainly because she and her husband, stage actor Martin Buchanan, are apart so much, giving her the time she needs to write.

She spends half the year here as director of UC Davis’ creative writing program while her husband lives mostly at their 120-acre ranch near Creede, a remote wrinkle in a road through south-western Colorado’s San Juan Mountains.

Both places are a long way from the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border where Houston grew up, a Jersey girl with Philadelphia sports loyalties. In essays, she has painted harsh portraits of both parents as insensitive boozers, and they figure prominently, albeit fictionalized, in the back story of “Sight Hound” -- as they do in most of her work.

Houston’s mother, who died a few years ago, was a former actress who obsessed about her daughter’s weight, felt trapped by her own marriage and who encouraged Houston, then 29, to have an abortion for the sake of her freedom (she did).

“What I realize now,” Houston wrote a few years later, “is that when she gave me advice, she had been talking not about me, but about herself.”

An obsessive controller, the mother measured out food at mealtimes, ever wary of adding weight to a daughter’s sturdy frame. “A fat girl is nothing but a fat girl, no matter what else she accomplishes in her life,” Houston once wrote, describing her mother’s morning comment as she struggled into a girdle.

Houston’s father, now in his 90s and living in New Jersey, was a playboy who married late in life and didn’t bother masking his disappointment that his only child wasn’t a future Chris Evert on the tennis court. It was a home of coldness and occasional violence that reached bone-breaking extremes -- Houston’s leg, she says, when she was 4. The family lie was that she had tumbled an empty concrete planter on top of herself. When she thinks of her childhood, Houston invariably thinks of fear, and of a self-image painted by what she wasn’t -- thin, beautiful and graceful.

Houston also had a caretaker with the improbable name of Martha Washington, who filled many of the roles Houston’s mother abandoned. A generous and supportive woman, Washington showed Houston that there are different models of how adults live and relate to children.

Houston is childless both by choice and by circumstance -- she had a miscarriage at 36. She has, in recent years, developed a nurturing friendship with a close friend’s adolescent daughter -- proof that she can pick her role models, and that fate and biology do not mean she will become the woman her mother was.

For all the dour undertones in her work, Houston’s main focus is the joy of life -- the irreducible light of a desert dawn, the panic-jolt of adrenaline then sheer euphoria of surviving a killing set of rapids, the quiet satisfaction of a love that has ripened. She is given to quick, flashing smiles and a deep, sudden laugh. When she phrases points in conversation, she closes her eyes, momentarily retreating within herself as she speaks aloud.

Yet, the past is never far away, adding an unavoidable weight on her relationships with both parents. Houston cried at her mother’s funeral. “My mother and I had a difficult relationship, but I loved her a lot,” Houston says. Yet she never discussed the hurtful past with her mother, which she says she regrets. And she also deflects questions about why she hasn’t broached the past with her father.

The bigger curiosity, she says, is that they speak at all. They last saw each other in May when he made a side trip up to Davis while in Santa Barbara scouting a possible move. Houston says she recalled the familiar foreboding as her father slept in her tiny duplex.

“He’s 94, 96 years old or whatever,” Houston says with a self-conscious laugh. “I mean, I can take him. But that fear was still there.”

The line between fact and fiction shifts like a river current in Houston’s work. Her highly regarded collections of short stories -- “Cowboys Are My Weakness” (1992) and “Waltzing the Cat” (1998) -- explored the emotional insecurity of women bouncing from lover to lover, place to place and animal to animal even as her protagonists established their independence as western ranchers and river guides, hunters and horse riders -- all roles Houston has assumed.

In “Sight Hound,” as in Houston’s life, roots are finally taking hold. The catalyst is another Irish wolfhound named Dante, who died Feb. 8, 2002, after a long battle with bone cancer. Houston believes that experience, and Dante’s effect on the people in Houston’s life, helped her finally learn what should have been adolescent lessons about the sacrifices required to mesh your life with someone else’s, and the generosity of self that nourishes love.

“I believe that animals are capable of a kind of purity of emotion that we long to be capable of,” Houston says. “I think Dante taught me -- or I chose to learn via Dante -- so much about the relationship between love and loss, and that you can’t pretend that those things aren’t indelibly joined. He asked me to rise to the occasion of loving him, knowing that I was going to lose him, and knowing that if I did and I could, my life would be much richer for it.”

Houston realizes she sounds like an odd mix of Dr. Dolittle and Dr. Phil.

“Do I believe that [Dante] thought all those things consciously?” she asks. “I don’t know, but he knew a great deal. Who knows what it is for a dog to know? I let him be my teacher. Whether I was inventing that scenario more than he was, I don’t know -- it doesn’t matter.”

Dante’s instructive illness coincided with Houston’s finding an effective therapist. Both happened at a time in her life in which she felt herself maturing, slowing down, tiring of solitude and beginning to get a firmer grasp of the “death” part of death-defying rappelling and rafting trips. Dante served as an emotional bridge for her tentative steps toward emotional intimacy. First the dog, then people.

“[Dante] was so intensely connected to me,” Houston says. “That was what my parents were not.... To have it 30 years late but to have it nonetheless, was gorgeous. It was heavenly.”

While Houston can’t let go of the past, her editor, Carol Houck Smith, lines it out of her fiction. They have come to the agreement that for characters like Rae, Houston’s alter ego in “Sight Hound,” the details of how the scars were formed are less significant than their ramifications.

“I don’t think there needs to be any more than there is,” Houston says, stretched out in an oversized armchair in the living room of her duplex, Fenton napping in the dining room. “Rae’s childhood is not the point.... We can focus on what’s more interesting, which is how it’s all manifesting now.”

“Sight Hound” began as a series of interrelated short stories. As Houston worked, the stories evolved into a novel, largely for structural reasons. She wanted to have a variety of first-person voices reflect on the illness and death of Dante -- including Dante and two other pets -- and the only way to make that work in a reasonable chronology was as a novel.

Building a book around talking animals is a risky venture, but Houston thinks readers -- especially pet owners -- will be able to suspend skepticism.

“I understand people are going to give me hell for it, and I understand reviewers are going to focus on it,” Houston says. “For me, it wasn’t any more of a stretch than speaking for” human characters.

It’s nearly 6 p.m. on a class night and Houston can’t find her copy of J.M. Coetzee’s novel “Disgrace,” which is not all that surprising given the stacks that grow like stalagmites inside her duplex. She checks the living room and the dinner table, where more writing than eating gets done, and makes a run through her bedroom, then she repeats it all twice. She wants the book handy while leading the evening’s discussion, and it’s just not to be found. And now she’s late, no time to swing by her office to check, so off she goes bookless to the downtown Cafe Mediterranee for a weekly dinner meeting with six of her UC Davis graduate students.

By the time Houston walks in, five of the six students have ordered their food -- sandwich wraps and salads, shish kebabs and a sauce of pureed sweet red peppers. Some are already eating. All are waiting for Houston, and she is cast suddenly in her least favorite position -- the center of attention.

Some writers crave this, but Houston would just as soon melt into the background, where she can watch and digest and understand.

“I like the feeling of becoming invisible,” she says. “I try to make myself disappear so that things go on normally around me.”

They talk for a bit about a campus appearance the night before by Nobelist Toni Morrison, organized by Houston, and dissect what went right (most of it) and what went wrong (surprisingly little.)

They finally get around to “Disgrace” and protagonist David Lurie, a white South African college professor whose fall from grace is propelled by an affair with a student. Lurie flees his life in Capetown for his daughter Lucy’s remote farm, where she is raped by three black men and he is set afire. They both survive but come to realize they were targeted, not picked by random, in a crime with obvious overtones of South Africa’s post-apartheid race relations. Lucy discovers she’s pregnant and signs over her farm and sexual favors to her neighbor, a relative of one of the rapists, in exchange for protection.

“What did we like about David as a protagonist?” Houston asks, then prods with the statement: “I think we like him for his extreme honesty, how unafraid he is to tell what he knows as the truth.”

The conversation picks up quickly. “He’s a creep, and he beds a young girl, but he didn’t force her,” one of the students says, trying to separate the venal from the human. Other voices chime in. It would have worked better as a movie, offers one. No, counters another, there’s too much unspoken internal terrain to work on the screen.

As the workshop progresses, Houston sits quietly, making her way through her dinner and listening to the debate unfold around her, filling, for the moment, her favorite role -- the invisible observer.