Bouncing between men and narrators

Pam Houston’s 1992 collection of linked stories about women and the men who did them wrong gave her a jump-start in the literary world. The heroines of “Cowboys Are My Weakness” described the quest for the ideal man with the yearning simplicity of country music while keeping up with the guys on their most arduous extreme adventures. She was heralded as a woman who could write about the West in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway and Richard Ford.

Houston followed up with “Waltzing the Cat,” a collection about an intrepid woman photographer, and the memoir “A Little More About Me,” which told of encounters with “grizzly bears and gynecologists, silver mines and steelhead fishermen ... a few good men, and a lot of good dogs.”

From the start, Houston has shown a gift for the direct attack. Fiction or fact, her stories begin cleanly. Typical is “Cowboys’ ” opener: “I have a picture in my mind of 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.” Her essay “The Long Way to Safety” begins: “Early this summer, I paid $4,500 for a horse.”

Such clarity is dismayingly absent in her first novel, “Sight Hound.” In its chaotic opening section, we meet Rae, who seems at first to be a familiar Houston narrator, driving along Colorado 64. In three pages, Houston refers to another character’s dream of Rae in a past life as a man, a memory Rae has had of a past life as a soldier dying on a battlefield, a young actor’s effect on Rae, a boyfriend who has left her, a visit to her therapist and a trip to a Tibetan monastery. Help! Where am I?

The novel settles into a breezy if sometimes smarmy groove with the narrative voice of Dante, an Irish wolfhound in remission from bone cancer whose “one true goal” is to stay alive long enough to help Rae find a human who will love her properly after he is gone. Dante has enough charm to hold the wary reader through various accounts of his last years interspersed in the book. He quotes Buddha and offers a loving picture of Rae, a playwright whose damaged childhood has left her overweight, depressed and vulnerable to a wide range of awful men.

Before long we encounter less winning narrators. There is Howard, Rae’s narcissistic actor husband; a monosyllabic vet; Rose, the beta dog in the household, who refers to Dante sarcastically as the “enlightened one” and describes her fondness for “poopsicles,” picked up barely frozen from the horse pasture; Darlene, the housekeeper on Rae’s ranch; Stanley the cat; a cancer victim named Sophie; and Rae’s friend Mona, who likes to bring women home for threesomes with her husband. Least appealing is Jonathan, Rae’s former writing partner, who describes watching TV on Sept. 11 as people trapped above the floors where the planes hit the World Trade Center decided to jump. “I’ll admit, it’s a little thrilling to think about their decision,” he muses.

Although these characters are differentiated by circumstance, their voices have an unfortunate sameness. And breaking the narrative into so many chunks gives the novel an irritating choppiness and distance. Would that Houston had let Rae -- or Dante -- tell the story.

Still, we have Houston’s exquisite descriptions of the natural world, including one of the worst forest fires in Colorado history. (“We came home to black skies and an orange sun, a creek that was barely more than a trickle, a hot howling wind that kicked up dust devils the size of tornadoes, and ash falling onto our hair.... “) And her villain -- Eddie Kominsky, a former pro hockey player turned evangelist who showers Rae with gifts and tries to break up her marriage -- is portrayed with great heft and gusto. (Ironically he seems more authentic than the well-intentioned men in Rae’s life.) Despite its flaws, “Sight Hound” is likely to appeal to Houston fans, especially those who believe that pets are kinder, gentler beings than the humans in our lives.

Jane Ciabattari is the author of the short-story collection “Stealing the Fire.”