Arts
Having It Both Ways
Maile Meloy performs her usual empathetic acrobatics in her latest short story collection.
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Maile Meloy's new collection of stories, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, takes its title from an A.R. Ammons poem that appears both as the epigraph of the book and as an allusion in one of the stories. A man named Fielding has gathered his family at their lake house to disclose an affair with his children's former swimming instructor and to leave his wife. Re-ensconced in the armature of marriage and real estate, however, he finds himself unable or unwilling to speak and suddenly remembers the Ammons poem, which his daughter once brought home from college. It goes, in its entirety: "One can't have it both ways, and both ways is the only way I want it." Fielding wants it both ways so badly it hurts his teeth. "What kind of fool wanted it only one way?" he asks himself.
Not many fools in Meloy's stories do. Each of the 11 stories here features people trying to hold onto what they can't or shouldn't have while ignoring what they know to be the price, or ought to know, anyway. Adultery is the classic example of having it both ways, but Meloy finds other, more morally complex ones. In "Red From Green," a man who is helping his brother to cajole a reluctant witness into testifying for the victims of an industrial poisoning ignores the witness's attempts to seduce his 15-year-old daughter; the father's willful blindness leaves his daughter teetering near catastrophe. In "Lovely Rita," a nuclear plant worker, Steven Kelly, trying to do something for his just-deceased best friend's girlfriend, Rita, winds up helping her raffle herself off for cash, as if it were possible to be a protector and a pimp at the same time.
Steven is a gentle soul, and Meloy is gentle with him. A pained witness to the many varieties of corrosion (environmental, corporate, moral) eating away at his small Connecticut town, he comes off as almost courageous: Rita claims she'll hold the raffle with or without him and maybe by getting involved, he can shield her from some of the ugliness to follow. Meloy has gained her cachet as a novelist by demonstrating an unerring empathy for her characters, even when they are a great deal more culpable than Steven. Her steady affection for characters on all sides of a story made her first novel, Liars and Saints (2003)—an intergenerational saga about a French-Canadian family in California, replete with statutory rape, incest, callow priests, secrets, and lies—a thing of loveliness instead of the tawdry melodrama it could have been. Meloy's next novel, A Family Daughter, which revisited the events of Liars and Saints, didn't match its power and plausibility, but it performed similarly acrobatic perspectival shifts.
Read the rest of this article in Slate.
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