Fiction Addict

Genre: Literary

Publisher: Riverhead

Released: July 2009

Reviewed by Jonathan Schindler

For Maile Meloy’s newest collection of short stories, the epigraph (by A. R. Ammons) says it all: “One can’t have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it.” Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It is a collection of eleven short stories, and while the stories feature different characters, settings, and situations, they are thematically linked through longing and ambivalence.

I’ll start by saying that Meloy’s writing is fantastic. I mentioned in an earlier review that I think the best writing is seamless, and the effect of reading the best writing is similar to watching a great magic act: you marvel that magic has taken place under your careful observation, and there’s little you can say toward explanation. That’s how I felt in reading each of Meloy’s stories in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It. The prose is unadorned, at times seemingly flat. The sentences seem like ordinary sentences. But it is the author’s genius of craft that takes these everyday materials and creates something of beauty.

Beauty may seem distant from the subject matter of this collection—most of the stories deal with longing and discontent in general, and many of them focus on adultery in particular. Yet despite the sometimes sordid material and the many unlikable characters doing unlikable things, Meloy achieves beauty by forging empathy.

One of the best examples of this is the story “Two-Step.” The story opens with two women talking, the first woman speculating that her husband is having an affair. The second woman, a coworker of the first woman’s husband, tries to reassure her that he probably isn’t. Through their conversation, several facts are gradually revealed to the reader: the husband is having an affair; the first woman is the man’s second wife, and the man left his previous wife to marry her; and the second woman is the woman the husband is currently having an affair with. This scenario doesn’t seem to leave room for much empathy, since all three characters in the story are cheaters. But Meloy’s skill is such that the broader emotions—what it feels like when we are betrayed, or when we unintentionally hurt others by pursuing our own desires, or when we want so badly to have both stability and change—are what come through in spite of the particulars.

Ambivalence is another consistent thread through this collection, and it is perhaps nowhere better expressed than in the story “The Children.” A man in the midst of an affair decides it’s time to tell his wife that he’s leaving her. But breaking up is hard to do. He finally realizes what a mess he’s in, what leaving his wife (and the titular children) will mean. He is at the fork of two competing desires, both equally strong, and he realizes that he can’t have it both ways.

And that is illustrative of the situations that Meloy describes so well in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It. Life is not full of having cake and eating, too—despite what we are shown on television. Meloy presents the many places where life is a strict dichotomy, an either-or. In some cases a decision may be delayed, but ultimately a decision must be made. These decisions are sometimes costly and sometimes plain disastrous, and many times they are the result of our own errant desires. As illustrated in “Two-Step,” cheating is a double-edged sword: a union sown in subterfuge and deceit is likely to reap the same. Meloy’s book, while helping the reader empathize with its characters and carefully and beautifully delineating dilemmas, is also a warning against the situations its characters find themselves in. As a reader, I see that the characters are in a tough spot and I empathize, but I also will do whatever I can not to put myself into their situations in the first place.

I should mention that there are a few moments of levity in the collection, stories not as intense or gloomy as the others. “Spy vs. Spy,” for example, believably (and humorously) describes a dysfunctional family and the ambivalence that comes with some family relationships, equal measures love and hate. “O Tannenbaum,” while the tension in the air is thick, is an enjoyable story of the unexpected adventures that befall a family on the way home from the supposedly joyous endeavor of choosing a Christmas tree. But perhaps the lightest story in the collection, and also my favorite, is “Liliana,” in which a man’s dead wealthy grandmother comes to stay with his family in their lower-middle-class home to determine if he’s a worthy heir for her fortune.

Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It proves that Maile Meloy is certainly a writer to watch. The stories, while containing adult situations and language, nevertheless succeed in being beautiful, even magical.

Review copy provided by Riverhead.