Maile Meloy
Reading one of Maile Meloy's stories is like driving down a wintry road dusted with fine, sparkling snow. Don't let the light surface fool you, there's black ice underneath. Meloy writes domestically familiar scenarios in unadorned prose, and yet somehow, around every bend, you find yourself bracing for danger.
Black ice, literally, in the collection's grittily poignant opener, Travis, B. We meet a lonely ranch hand, aged beyond his years by childhood polio and a horse breaker's shattered bones. He develops a burning but ill-fated crush on a young lawyer from out of town. Things go predictably wrong, but it's the how that keeps us riveted.
Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It is Meloy's fourth book, a return to short fiction after two novels. By critical consensus, it's the stories that gleam: They are widely lauded and have reaped several awards, including the PEN/Malamud. Like her first book, Half in Love, this new collection is set largely in Montana, Meloy's home territory by birth. The landscape is rendered with such visceral immediacy, from the stark plains to the touristed ski slopes, you believe that she could navigate the state blindfolded.
Two-Step shows us the inner workings of a romantic triangle between a medical resident, her lover and his unwitting wife. The author never shies from spotlighting her most fascinating characters - the other woman, in this case - those who know the truth but find themselves in the precarious position of hiding it: "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 any more, and then he would be the man he was. It would happen soon, and then he would need her."
In The Girlfriend, Leo is the father of a murdered girl. He has just come from the courtroom gallery, where a long-awaited conviction has been handed down. The scene unfolds afterward, in an anonymous hotel room, as Leo interrogates the killer's girlfriend. It's no accident that Leo is a lawyer himself. Lawyers appear frequently in this collection, as do all those little rules that govern our moral upkeep. Lucky for the reader Meloy is not interested merely in victims, but in the intricate moral conundrums of the accomplice. Duplicity is a big theme.
Meloy is a compassionate storyteller, neither judging her characters' flaws nor prettifying outcomes. We may see endings rise inevitably from the horizon, yet small twists keep us swept up, turning pages, not knowing precisely how things will come out. O Tannenbaum is just such a story. A family drives down a logging road with a freshly harvested Christmas tree. They come across an attractive couple standing in a roadside snowbank, holding a broken ski. The hitchhikers climb aboard, and introduce themselves as "Bonnie and Clyde." As the car fills with steamy breath, so too does the story - with ominous possibility.
The collection's title comes from an A.R. Ammons poem, a line repeated in the story The Children, about a middle-aged man caught between two women, his wife and a younger mistress. He's snagged on that barbed edge between either and or, in that fraught, delicious moment before opportunities harden into consequences. Love and loathing. Regret and desire. Meloy is an ace at mixing paradoxical sensations, emotions you'd never expect to see in the same paragraph.
A couple of the stories wobble. In Lovely Rita, a man named Acey dies in an industrial accident. In the aftermath, his girlfriend, Rita, sells raffle tickets to his co-workers. The prize is Rita, for one night, and with the money raised she plans to escape town. Acey's old friend Stephen becomes involved, agreeing to broker tickets. The scenario is a stretch: men eager to win sex with a woman fresh from her lover's funeral, a best friend willing to play pimp.
Believable or not, the writing is the issue, with clunky dialogue and a resolution that makes one wonder why Rita's last resort was not her first - just borrow the money, already. And, alas, we find less of Meloy's usual quirky, underdog wisdom at work.
Spy vs. Spy presents two brothers on a ski vacation, one an orthopedic surgeon, the other a ski instructor. It's a sibling rivalry with unplumbed depths, glossed with arguments over beef versus soy, bourgeois versus gypsy living. The result is a forced climax - a bout of altitude sickness and a brotherly punch-up on an out-of-bounds black diamond run.
But these are small impediments to the book's many pleasures. Meloy has been compared to Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore. She shares Munro's beguiling seamlessness. But unlike Lorrie Moore, Meloy is a minimal stylist. You won't find these stories studded with metaphors. The prose is as plain as milk. It's refreshing to read such lean sentences, the human psyche so honestly rendered. At their best, Meloy's stories are economical things, full of life, condensed and unsweetened.
Charlotte Gill is a Vancouver writer and author of the story collection Ladykiller.