-
Access Our
Most Anticipated
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Stories
by Maile Meloy
Book Reviewed by:Award-winning writer Maile Meloy’s return to short stories explores complex lives in an austere landscape with the clear-sightedness that first endeared her to readers.
Meloy’s first return to short stories since her critically acclaimed debut, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It is an extraordinary new work from one of the most promising writers of the last decade.
Eleven unforgettable new stories demonstrate the emotional power and the clean, assured style that have earned Meloy praise from critics and devotion from readers. Propelled by a terrific instinct for storytelling, and concerned with the convolutions of modern love and the importance of place, this collection is about the battlefields—and fields of victory—that exist in seemingly harmless spaces, in kitchens and living rooms and cars. Set mostly in the American West, the stories feature small-town lawyers, ranchers, doctors, parents, and children, and explore the moral quandaries of love, family, and friendship. A ranch hand falls for a recent law school graduate who appears unexpectedly— and reluctantly—in his remote Montana town. A young father opens his door to find his dead grandmother standing on the front step. Two women weigh love and betrayal during an early snow. Throughout the book, Meloy examines the tensions between having and wanting, as her characters try to keep hold of opposing forces in their lives: innocence and experience, risk and stability, fidelity and desire.
Knowing, sly, and bittersweet, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It confirms Maile Meloy’s singular literary talent. Her lean, controlled prose, full of insight and unexpected poignancy, is the perfect complement to her powerfully moving storytelling.
Even if I wasn't already a fan of Maile Meloy's writing, I would have read
Both Ways
Is the Only Way I Want It for the title alone. In the collection's
penultimate story, a conflicted husband reflects on a poem by
A.R. Ammons (One
can't/have it/both ways/and both/ways is/the only/way I/want it). He lies
curled up with his wife of three decades, comforted by her intelligence and
aging beauty, while he contemplates leaving her for the recently-teenaged girl
who taught their now-grown children how to swim. The force with which he
wanted it both ways made him grit his teeth. What kind of fool wanted it only
one way? Each of the eleven stories poses this same question, as affairs,
marriages, and childhoods teeter on the edge of decision: go or stay, live it up
or keep on living. None of the characters are terribly likeable, but their
interior conflicts make us feel for them, even as we narrow our eyes at their
lack of fortitude. In "Two-Step", a woman reflects on her best friend's
unfaithful husband: He was acting like the man he wanted to be, in hopes that
he could become it. He would keep acting until he couldn't stand it anymore, and
then he would be the man he was.
These are stories about people becoming who
they are, and the great drama is in the wishy-washiness of the wrestling.
Meloy's prose is clean, but not too spare, detailed without feeling labored,
quiet, but never detached -- all of which elevate the often piddling nature of
the central conflict to great emotional effect. For a writer these stories are
examples of true craftsmanship, and for a reader they are just plain good.
Abbreviated from "Short
Stories for Summer by Lucia Silva..continued
Full Review
(291 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by Lucia Silva).
If you liked Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, try these:
by Amy Gustine
Published 2016
A debut collection of short stories which sympathetically explores some of the toughest dilemmas we face in our struggle though life.
by Edith Pearlman
Published 2015
A new story collection from the author of Binocular Vision, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the National Book Award.
I am what the librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
