Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

May 25, 2009
Meloy (Liars and Saints
) hits some high notes in these stories of people juggling conflicting emotions with varying shades of success. In “The Children,” a man's resolve to leave his wife for his now-grown children's former swimming instructor is unexpectedly “doomed to ambivalence and desire” when he's confronted by the comforting “habit of his marriage.” Marital tensions are also at the heart of “O Tannenbaum,” in which a couple, while hunting for a Christmas tree with their daughter, pick up a stranded couple whose bickering casts into relief the cracks in their own relationship. Other pieces focus on loneliness, as in the opening story about a young ranch hand's efforts to connect with a lawyer moonlighting as a night-school teacher, or as in “Agustín,” where an elderly widower yearns for a lost, illicit lover. Meloy's characters frequently leave each other or let each other down, and it is precisely that—their vulnerabilities, failures and flaws—that make them so wonderful to follow as they vacillate between isolation and connection.

June 1, 2009
Meloy (A Family Daughter, 2006, etc.) explores loneliness in 11 stories set mostly in her native Montana.

"Travis, B." depicts a young cowboy, working away from his family and desperately lonely, attempting to woo an adult-ed teacher. His growth in self-awareness does not mitigate the heartbreak of his failure."Lovely Rita" is another lost young adult; after her lover dies in a power-plant accident, she raffles herself off to raise money to find the father who abandoned her years before. While Travis and Rita are cut off from family, most of Meloy's characters are alone within their families. The adolescent protagonist of"Red from Green" loves her father but goes away to school; recognizing his inability to protect her, she chooses loneliness as a permanent state. In"Liliana," a Los Angeles man's supposedly dead grandmother shows up on his doorstep, alive and ready to reject him all over again."Nine" is Valentina's age when her mother begins an affair with an Italian professor. It soon becomes clear that the affair is doomed, but Valentina mourns the loss of the man's ten-year-old son in her life."Spy vs. Spy" shows a man and his brother dealing with long-simmering sibling rivalry. Despite their relative brevity, these are complex stories, often showing several characters being pulled in different directions. In what may be the volume's masterpiece, Leo meets with"The Girlfriend" of the man who raped and murdered Leo's daughter. In an anti-O'Henry twist, the loving father unearths a truth better left buried: that his own protectiveness may have caused his daughter's death.

The author seldom allows a trickle of hope to lighten her characters' anguish, but she gives them a consciousness and dignity that make their experiences deeply moving.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from June 1, 2009
Readers drawn to the short story are sometimes disappointed upon reading a collection by a single author, even one they favor. The collection might seem padded, or the voice that struck us as original and engaging becomes boringly familiar halfway through. No such hazard awaits the readers of this new collection. The award-winning Meloy ("Half in Love") continues to deliver stories that please and surprise as each narrative's small world unfolds. As one would expect from its cunning title, taken from a poem by A.R. Ammons, this collection features desire in its many, often contradictory elements, encounters that take a character by surprise but hardly make a ripple in anybody else's world. For example, the young Montana ranch hand in "Travis, B," finds himself smitten by the harried young teacher of an adult education class he happens upon just by following people into the classroom building. It's the act of entering the building that frees him, not the unlikely possibility of romance, and the reader comes to know him just as he begins to know himself. VERDICT Readers who have waited impatiently for Meloy's return to this genre, perhaps the one in which Meloy herself seems most at home, have a treat in store.Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2009
Meloy, a magnet for major prizes, including aGuggenheim fellowship and the PEN/Malamud Award, presents her fourth intense book, acollection ofmolten short stories that erupt from a volatile combination of the tender and the vicious. As before, her writing is of the transparent sort, drawing readers into the peculiar and wrenching predicaments facing her dazed characters as theyfeel their way through a poisoned world where nuclear power plants kill off fish and developments doom lush habitats. Dualities and extremes abound as Meloys gentle, deer-in-the-headlight protagonists are stunned by the escapades of their daring, outlandish, even outlaw intimates. Take the bruising rivalry between brothers in Spy vs. Spy, one an orderly doctor, the other a boastful ski instructor. Or the father confronting the slutty girlfriend of the guy who murdered hisdaughter. Or Steven, in Lovely Rita, reluctantly helping his dead friends lover in a sordid scheme. Nothing is resolved in Meloys wicked stories of lies, desire, and bloodshed, most set inher home state, Montana. Instead her bedeviled charactersare left contemplating their sorrows and regrets.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)