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

Rating: 4.5 stars

The rating isn’t to say it’s one of the best books ever or an instant classic (whatever that means), but it is pretty good. And it came to me when I needed it. I went to the library to find a book, any book, and I happened to stumble on this one immediately, by an author I’d never heard of. I read that it was a short story collection, and I almost put it down (there are some authors that are good at this, but most aren’t).

But the first paragraph grabbed me:

“Chet Morgan grew up in Logan, Montana, at a time when kids weren’t supposed to get polio anymore. In Logan, they still did, and he had it before he was two…”

It goes on, but this was all I needed. Okay, so depressing stories about rural communities and people trying and failing to better themselves, either because of their own flaws, their culture, their circumstances, or a combination thereof is my jam. I think it’s a lot of people’s jams, so there’s nothing about it that makes me special. But right here, you know what you’re getting into.

First off, the name is pretty much a stereotype. It’s hackneyed, but I would think that’s the point. Maybe I’m giving the author too much credit, but the book was published in 2009. Given the references to Dante’s Inferno and other things, I can’t help but conclude that she’s self-aware. The next sentence describes the modern world so concisely, that the deprivations and the insurances we have in place against needless suffering can never prevent them from happening. And the protagonist of our first story isn’t someone who can get away from it.

I’m not going to go too into depth on the individual stories since that would take me forever. The stories most have the same thematic elements and construction. We come in at some sort of crisis and witness some choices. I know this is about choices because the book flap tells me. And agents (and maybe publishers) go crazy over this thing, even if I think it’s way overrated as a storytelling instrument. After all, we don’t call it ‘choice making’. Okay, that’s my complaining done. I’ll go onto some things that stood out or not.

Now, some of these are what I’d call false choices if I knew exactly what it meant. The worst story is probably the story about the father of a murdered daughter confronting the girlfriend of the murderer. What’s the choice here? It’s presented as ‘to confront her or not’, later as ‘to have sex with her or not’, more or less ‘to become corrupted or not’, but it’s not really a choice, even if he chooses to not hurt her, to have sex or whatnot. He ultimately has a realization that the murder may have been an overreaction to him calling the police because his daughter was kidnapped while on the phone with him. But… he’s rich and has fancy lawyers so, like, surely he realizes he didn’t commit the murder. I think the point is that all the façades he had are lost because of what happened, so uh, this isn’t really a choice?

But some of them are great. The first is fantastic, and the second is pretty good too. And that isn’t really about a choice (I mean, it is, but it’s not very important to the story), but it’s a fantastic read about rural life and such. Read it for yourself. I suggest it. In any case, it’s a story that really isn’t about a choice but is great, just like another story isn’t about a choice and is bad.

Anyway, my absolute favorite is a story where a doctor talks to the wife of her colleague. The wife knows that her husband’s cheating with her on someone at the hospital but doesn’t suspect the doctor. You can figure out who’s doing the cheating with the husband, what with the doctor’s own failing marriage, but it’s never explicitly stated. You get the real choice at the end of the story, that it was the protagonist’s choice not to say what’s going on.

Either way, I really enjoyed the vast majority of these stories. The author has a really good knack for getting and holding my attention.