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Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It Maile Meloy Books

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Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It Maile Meloy Books

Meloy's collection of short stories examines situations where characters are faced with what seems to me a choice between that which is heavily desired and dutifully mundane. The collection opens with one of my favorite stories, "Travis, B". In this short, the author depicts a shy and untested love; cut off before it could turn into something - love or otherwise. Meloy was quite deft at putting this reader in the same emotional space as Chet as he guardedly extends himself to Beth, exposing his desire for requited love (or for sex, it could have gone either way but I was obviously feeling a bit more sensitive when I read it :-) ).

"O Tannenbaum" is my other favorite and bookends the collection with a dangerously titillating tale of a married couple who picks up a stranded couple on a dark mountain highway. This encounter kept me on edge as it revealed precariously forbidden, deliciously decadent fantasies that had to be reconciled with the moral confines of the time. I found myself smiling a lot while reading this short; not sure if it was the content of the story or the author's tight orchestration of the words and scenes that delivered it.

While these are two of the stories I enjoyed most from the collection the other stories from "Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It" reinforce the theme of desire versus virtue. But what about the other Way - you know, the stuff that lays between the two extremes making it possible for All Ways to Be the Best Way to Have It? There were a few stories in the collection that I'd love to see expanded to novel form with a third choice in the mix. Overall, "Both Ways . . . "was an enjoyable quick read that left me wanting more of each story; the way a good collection of shorts should. Recommended.


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Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It Maile Meloy Books Reviews

It is always a treat to find a new writer with perfected writing skills exhibited in her early work. This is certainly the case with Ms. Meloy's collection of short stories. There are central themes that run through her works, such as chronic dissatisfaction with life's choices and options and paths taken. This is the underlying reality of much of human existence and she captures it well. There is also a sadness to many of her stories, as people grieve their lost loves, lives, ambitions, and dreams. We read about people experiencing their first heart ache and people experiencing their last heart ache. It is Meloy's strength that she captures the essence of this pain in similar yet different ways for each character. We all know heart ache and yet we all know each heart ache is unique. Meloy captures this seeming contradiction in the human condition. The collection also includes stories of sexual desire first awakening as teens become adults. However, Meloy is able to capture the first stages of this awakening in grammar school children as they experience their first attachments. In this regard Meloy is Freudian in that Freud saw sexual development as occurring in stages with sexual thoughts and longings and attachments occurring in children. Meloy also writes of fools and gives us a sense of dread as we see foolish actions leading to gradual disaster. When she introduced a new foolish character into a story I found myself thinking "This is not good" and Meloy always proved me correct. Meloy also is able to capture a male perspective around romance and attachment that is very valid. Men in her stories often withdraw from relationships for a range of reasons including past loss, feelings of inadequacy, and lack of desire to enter into the drama that constitutes some relationships. There are some women that men instinctively know are trouble yet some men go for the drama thinking they will be the one to meet the questionable lady's needs. Sibling rivalry is a complex experience and Meloy captures the way siblings know through instinct and experience and rivalry just exactly to say and do to tick off a sibling, no matter how old they are or how long they have been apart. One story deals with how a woman deals with the woman with whom her husband is having an affair, a perfect story of strategy and winner takes all. She also writes of grief and tragedy and details better left unexplored and old lovers better left in our history rather than pulled into our present. Her writing style is economical, such as that of Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, or Truman Capote, but never as thinned down to the dried bone, like that of Cormac McCarthy, the master of economic writing. I found many of the stories unsettling, realizing that they teach life lessons that no one can really learn, since we are compelled to live our lives, mistakes and regrets and all the other things that come our way. Yet, even if some of the stories were disturbing, they all ring true and they all engage you fully as you read.
In America "nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes," but in the America envisioned by Maile Meloy the shortlist has been amended to death and infidelity (or, its contaminated form, lechery). The eleven stories here treat the bleak landscapes of her fiction with a restrained and sometimes lighthearted touch that is nearly always as distressing as it is effective.

"Travis, B.," the tale that opens the collection, seems to be the universal favorite among readers; it is also mine. Both the setting and the circumstances evoke (without imitating) the best stories of Annie Proulx. A lonely ranch hand wanders into an adult education classroom because it's the only thing that seems to be happening in town that night; he becomes infatuated with the teacher, a lawyer who has been "commuting" nine and a half hours (each way!) to teach the class. It's an impossible relationship, but it doesn't keep him from falling hard. Similarly, the adroitly concise "Two-Step" is about a woman comforting a friend whose husband is suspected of cheating; the story's midpoint twist unveils a liaison as unlikely to last as one requiring a ten-hour drive.

Meloy's fiction is (thankfully) understated throughout. She avoids the sentimental or melodramatic or ponderous, although her plots would tempt a lesser writer to extremes. She is at her best when she throws her characters into confined (or confining) situations. A couple of stories, however, are set on a broader stage and she strains to make things credible; what might be minimalist suddenly seems light. "Red from Green," for example, features a lawyer and his brother and daughter who take a potential witness in a workplace civil suit on a rafting and hunting trip, in an effort to convince him to testify; the brothers are oblivious of the man's designs on the fifteen-year-old girl. The shortness of the story and the pithiness of the prose don't support the convoluted relationships and schemings; the daughter is the only believable character, while the three men are little more than ciphers whose motivations and desires are left unsaid and unknowable.

Contrastively, the book's finale, "O Tannenbaum," avoids the complexities of illegal poaching and industrial poisoning and courtroom maneuvers and instead describes two couples, strangers to each other, and a child thrown together in a blizzard when the car belonging to the delightfully named Bonnie and Clyde is stolen. All five bring their own dramas to a claustrophobic and unsettling situation (the "outlaws" have serious relationship issues, to say the least). It's the perfect story to end a very good collection, in which "the threat of disorder and the steady, thrumming promise of having everything" constantly collide.
Meloy's collection of short stories examines situations where characters are faced with what seems to me a choice between that which is heavily desired and dutifully mundane. The collection opens with one of my favorite stories, "Travis, B". In this short, the author depicts a shy and untested love; cut off before it could turn into something - love or otherwise. Meloy was quite deft at putting this reader in the same emotional space as Chet as he guardedly extends himself to Beth, exposing his desire for requited love (or for sex, it could have gone either way but I was obviously feeling a bit more sensitive when I read it -) ).

"O Tannenbaum" is my other favorite and bookends the collection with a dangerously titillating tale of a married couple who picks up a stranded couple on a dark mountain highway. This encounter kept me on edge as it revealed precariously forbidden, deliciously decadent fantasies that had to be reconciled with the moral confines of the time. I found myself smiling a lot while reading this short; not sure if it was the content of the story or the author's tight orchestration of the words and scenes that delivered it.

While these are two of the stories I enjoyed most from the collection the other stories from "Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It" reinforce the theme of desire versus virtue. But what about the other Way - you know, the stuff that lays between the two extremes making it possible for All Ways to Be the Best Way to Have It? There were a few stories in the collection that I'd love to see expanded to novel form with a third choice in the mix. Overall, "Both Ways . . . "was an enjoyable quick read that left me wanting more of each story; the way a good collection of shorts should. Recommended.