Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

For the fourth consecutive year, it is my intention to read and discuss here the ten books named the best of the year by the New York Times Book Review. I start with a short-story collection, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy.

The eleven stories in this collection add up to a positive experience, but they didn't strike me as the kind that are best-of worthy. They are carefully considered slices of life of mostly middle-class people, several of whom live in Montana. They carry both an edge of whimsy and danger, and I'm not surprised that two of them appeared in The New Yorker, as they reek of writing workshops. Still, a few of them are absolute gems.

The first three are kind of rambling meditations. "Travis, B." concerns a cowboy who develops a crush on a lawyer teaching an adult-education class, but she has to quit because she has a nine-hour commute. "Red on Green" is told from the point of view of a teenage-girl on a camping trip with her father, but I found it's lack of focus unnerving. That is followed up by Lovely Rita, an interesting but ultimately disappointing story about an industrial accident and the disturbing aftermath when a woman auctions herself in a raffle. This story first appeared in Playboy, but is sexy only to someone who isn't paying attention.

"Two-Step" is an intriguing story that might work better as a play--a woman suspects her husband of cheating, so calls over a friend for comfort, not knowing that the friend is the one who is sleeping with her husband. Adultery is also the theme of "The Children," when a man who is ready to leave his wife for a younger woman has second thoughts, and is reminded of the poem that contains the collection's title. "Liliana" is the fanciful story of a man who gets a surprise visit from his eccentric grandmother--a surprise because he thought she was dead.

I think the least successful story is "Agustin," perhaps because it set in Argentina, far afield from Meloy's other stories. It, however, contains one of the best lines of the collection: "Children were experiments, and his had failed."

The best three stories are "Nine," "O Tanenbaum," and "Spy vs. Spy," all dealing with inter-family relationships. "Nine" concerns a young girl observing the relationship her mother is having with a college professor who isn't quite right. "O Tanenbaum" deals with a man and wife out chopping down a Christmas tree who come across a stranded couple in the snow. Meloy makes what appears to be a deadly mistake of naming the stranded couple Bonnie and Clyde, but gets away with it.

By far the best story is "Spy vs. Spy," which depicts the struggle between two brothers who can hardly stand each other sharing a weekend at a ski lodge. It's funny, angry, and rings completely true. The title is a reference to the ever-warring spies in the comics of Mad magazine, and Meloy paints her brother characters as similarly locked in a cosmic battle: "They were bound like two dogs with their tails tied together, unable to move without having some opposite effect on the other, unable to live a single restful minute without feeling the inevitable tug." It would make a great movie.