Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

Upon reading Maile Meloy's short story collection Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It, you get the feeling that her characters' mommas never taught them the expression "You can't have your cake and eat it too." These are stories that could fall flat into the category of moralizing censure, yet Meloy never chooses favorites amongst her cast of flawed characters. There is the unemployed man who depends upon a grandmother for financial freedom, the father who wishes his college-aged daughter to confide in him though he infantilizes her, the shut-in who hopes an indifferent woman will save him from dirty-magazine Saturday night fever. Theirs is a sad little world in which the only requirements for satisfaction are diametrically opposed, and the forces of irrational desire threaten to ruin them and their loved ones at any moment. Meloy shows that if writing fiction is what you want, sometimes you can have it both ways--her characters deserve empathy and frustration, love and distrust, sadness and laughter. The number of stories centering on the unfaithful family man who wants the Brady Bunch life and the affair with the Maureen McCormick lookalike gets a bit old, but Meloy's almost journalistic commitment to depicting the multi-faceted longing of the adulterer next door makes this objection seem as petty as storming upstairs screaming, "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia."