Book Review: Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It

Book #68

“He held his wife and felt himself anchored to everything that was safe and sure, and kept for himself the knowledge of how quickly he could let go and drift free.” — Maile Meloy, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It

[I read this over a month ago, but in an effort to let my lapse in reviews not affect my review quality, I got the book down off the shelf and re-familiarized myself with it, so I hope this review is better than my last.]

I had been wanting to read this book for months and months, so when I finally ordered it from The Book Depository this summer, I picked it up almost immediately. My lovely friend Zoë had it out from the library, too, so we decided to read it together (over 11,300km of distance cannot defeat us).

I really liked it. Meloy came at a good time for me, just as I was starting to give myself over to short stories, to really begin falling in love with a form I had previously seen as a something akin to a writer scratching an itch. I don’t know if that makes sense, but anyway. I fell into each of the stories, and although there where a few I enjoyed more than others (I will delve into detail shortly), overall the collection was such a success for me because I didn’t dislike any of them, which is what I felt was missing from Manguso’s solid effort, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, for example. While Meloy I’m sure has more to offer, her talents are fully displayed — she doesn’t tease, like Manguso, with short bursts of genius and then defeatedly deliver a run of the mill short. That said (while I don’t like to compare writers directly), Manguso probably has more untapped talent than Meloy.

My absolute favourites from the collection were Travis, B and Lovely Rita. The former is about recent law student graduate who takes on a part-time job almost impossibly far from where she lives and works her full-time job. There she meets Chet, who has no business being in the law seminars she gives, but who attends them anyway as he develops a crush on Beth. The jagged way the characters interact, the way you know they will never fit together perfectly, the silences and chatter caused by Beth’s exhaustion and Chet’s eagerness, combined with the Meloy’s style makes the story a beautiful read. The second, Lovely Rita, is about a small town where Stephen Kelley, recently orphaned, works at a local power plant. It’s a difficult story to describe without revealing the entire thing, but the entirely realistic characters and situation made me turn page after page in a flurry.

The collection includes stories such as Red From Green, about a girl close to her father trying to make the decision as to whether or not to move away to boarding school; Nine, about a single mother with a daughter beginning to date a single father with a son and The Children, about an unfaithful husband deciding whether or not to leave his wife for his mistress (the quote above is from this story).  

One of the saddest, I thought, was Águstin, about a widower who finds out his former mistress is now working as a maid and goes to visit her. The woman’s dignity, her acceptance of the hand life had dealt, combined with the melancholy of the widower and both words spoken and unspoken, moved me. 

My least favourites were Liliana — because I didn’t find the character particularly appealing nor did I understand what she wishes to achieve with the story, and The Girlfriend, because while it was a good premise I felt the story ambled too much in the beginning.

I feel compelled to quote Zoë to conclude this review:

“Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It is a collection tied together by the loneliness of the characters, by how displaced they are even within the stories, hardly belonging to the worlds in which they exist.”