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

The Barnes & Noble Review

After two exceedingly good novels (Liars and Saints was shortlisted for the Orange Prize), Maile Meloy has returned with a full collection of the terse, emotionally compact short stories that she nails with precision and grace. This collection is loaded with daddy issues. Taken together, they create an interesting arc about the effect of a father's love or lack thereof on young girls: The daughter of a single father is unnerved when he can't protect her; a father confronts the girlfriend of his daughter's killer; two brothers, a ski bum and a bourgeois doctor, despise one another but compete over their fierce love for the doctor's teenage daughter, whom he regards as "the best thing [he] had ever done." Meanwhile, a wealthy Argentinian patriarch who discovers his former mistress is now working as maid, can look at his two indulged daughters and think that "children were experiments and his had failed." Many of these stories take place in Meloy's native Montana, with its big skies, vast spaces, and freakish summer snow. She is particularly deft when describing men of few words and compelling actions: In "Travis B.," a small-town ranch hand courts a big-city lawyer by showing up to take her to dinner on his horse. And in the exceptional "Lovely Rita," a young factory worker, confronted with death and a love he can't quite seem to grasp or even acknowledge, chooses to exile himself from his home as a way to distance himself from regret. Each one of these stories is a tiny, perfectly crafted masterpiece. --Amy Benfer

From the Publisher

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 herpowerfully moving storytelling.

The New York Times - Curtis Sittenfeld

Almost all her characters are flawed…They are people who act irrationally, against their own best interests—by betraying those they care about, making embarrassing romantic overtures and knowingly setting in motion situations they'd rather avoid—and Meloy's prose is so clear, calm and intelligent that their behavior becomes eminently understandable.

Publishers Weekly

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. (July)

Samantha Dunn - Los Angeles Times

In the best short stories -- by Poe, Raymond Carver, Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor or Alice Munro -- there is always malaise, if not outright heartache, on the horizon. In less able hands this convention turns lugubrious and contrived. But Meloy's lean, targeted descriptions and her ultimately compassionate eye make this journey hurt so good.

Mary Pols - Time Magazine

These 11 stories are quick, powerful jabs, startling in their economy; you're propelled toward each ending, cetain she won't be able to wrap it up in one more page, and you're proved wrong every time

Judith Shulevitz - Slate.com

Precise and restrained, Meloy's diagnoses of a very American malignancy have an authentic moral force. So does her merciful treatment of the characters in its grip and of the victims of its spread. Young as she is (she's 37), she has a scope and maturity that at their most rigorous attain the grandeur of prophecy. We need to listen to our Cassandras when they're as wise as Meloy is. Nonetheless, it must be said-and this is a shameful thing to admit-that people who want it both ways are more interesting than the wreckage they leave in their wake.

Sarah Goldstein - GQ.com

Here, as in previous works like Half in Love, Meloy has a gift for portraying the tedium of waiting for things to happen in a place where they rarely do-and the shock that comes when something finally occurs. And if the mark of a good summer read is adultery and violence . . . well, it has that too.

Sue Russell - Library Journal

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

Kirkus Reviews

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 aconsciousness and dignity that make their experiences deeply moving.

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