Find the tallest thing around, and climb it.
That’s the philosophy Pam Houston embraces in her new novel, Contents May Have Shifted. This strategy gives her a high, wide view, and allows her character Pam (the work is semi-autobiographical) to experience the struggle between seeing the world, and being in it.
A story of love and travel told in 12 chapters, Contents May Have Shifted moves between scenes deeply invested in land and place, from New Zealand and Laos to Jackson Hole and Albuquerque, to plane flights which are invariably disturbed by turbulence and equipment malfunction. Anecdotes of travel to, say, a Buddhist temple in Laos, or Hawaii, where she watches a volcano erupt, are glued together with stories of break-ups and hookups. There’s the unstable Ethan, and and the start of a relationship with Rick; Pam’s split from the cheating Ethan (at the prodding of her friends) sets into motion a string of first dates that end less in disaster than ambivalence. Falling into a relationship with Rick, who is alternately more or less in love with his ex-wife, Pam also takes on the responsibility of Rick's daughter Madison, who acts as both catalyst and anchor.
Pushed forward by the anguish of failed relationships and an intensely felt wanderlust, the narrator eventually discovers the view from above is not the same as that from within. Along the way, she hovers between a self-indulgent, New Age soul search and a gritty need for an understanding of the earth and its other inhabitants. The danger of white-water rafting and maneuvering dog sleds in Colorado pale under the threat of becoming disconnected from the world, or tied down to a particular place. “I know plenty about the need to be airborne, and plenty about how raising the degree of difficulty sweetens the pot,” Houston writes. "I know what it's like to feel calmer—better—face-to-face with a female grizz at dusk on a caribou trail than when I'm contemplating, say, a year or a month, or even a week in the significant comforts of my very own house. I know all about the anatomy of restlessness and the crossover point of adrenaline addiction.”
Spanning nearly 20 countries and crossing the United States from New Jersey to Nevada, Contents May Have Shifted transcends the concerns of a linear narrative. Instead, it is a lyrical meditation on the limits of vision and experience, the routes we travel in order to reach an understanding of our place in the world, and how we cobble together a sense of selfhood from disparate parts.
“The circle of my now is wreaking havoc with the lines of my doing. I am learning to say yes, if not always immediately,” she writes. Fundamentally affirmative, Houston’s work places us on a peak between earth and sky, showing us how normal it is to both fall in love with, and feel nervous about, the eternally shifting nature of the self, and of the world.
