Irrational Behavior

BOOK REVIEW - By CURTIS SITTENFELD

BOTH WAYS IS THE ONLY WAY I WANT IT

By Maile Meloy

219 pp. Riverhead Books. $25.95.

Maile Meloy called her first novel “Liars and Saints,” but there was a fair amount of evidence she was being ironic, at least about the saints part. There was also a fair amount of evidence that Meloy sympathized with the sinners, an impression reinforced by the title and contents of her new story collection, “Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.” Almost all her characters are flawed: lawyers, Montana residents, unfaithful spouses, rich and eccentric older women, young women who are close to their fathers

in nice as opposed to creepy ways, and multiple combinations thereof. They are people who act irrationally, against their own best interests — by betraying those they care about, making embarrassing romantic overtures and knowingly setting in motion situations they’d rather avoid — and Meloy’s prose is so clear, calm and intelligent that their behavior becomes eminently understandable.

Beth, a recent law school graduate who appears in the first story, “Travis, B.,” is teaching an adult-education class on public-school law in Glendive, a small town on the eastern side of Montana. The problem is that she lives and works a nine-and-a-half-hour drive west, in Missoula. “I’ve never done anything so stupid in my life,” she tells Chet, a ranch worker in the class, about having accepted the teaching position, which she did out of anxiety over her student loans. Twice a week, Beth leaves her Missoula law firm at midday, makes the drive, teaches the class that evening, then turns around and spends the night driving home.

“There are deer on the road, and there’s black ice outside of Three Forks along the river,” she explains to Chet, who has quickly developed a crush on her. “If I make it past there, I get to take a shower and go to work at eight. . . . Then learn more school law tomorrow night, then leave work the next day before lunch and drive back here with my eyes twitching.” The bizarreness of Beth’s situation is matched by its plausibility; a kind of banal, daily desperation animates many of Meloy’s characters, including Chet, who first shows up in Beth’s classroom not as a real student, but as a lonely person who on a random night happens to stumble into the school because it’s one of the few buildings in town with its lights on.

While the American West is clearly close to her heart, Meloy — who is 37, grew up in Montana and now lives in Los Angeles, and has won prizes from The Paris Review and the American Academy of Arts and Letters — bravely plunks down her characters in a wide range of times and places, including a 1970s nuclear power plant, an East Coast boarding school and Argentina. All these settings are equally convincing, granted verisimilitude by Meloy’s eye for the casually perfect detail: the knee-to-nose stretch, performed while lying in bed beneath a Charlie Parker poster, that a boarding-school girl learns from her roommate; the party in Buenos Aires where an appearance by the Prince of Wales sends the guests into a frenzy and a woman’s pearl necklace breaks and scatters on the floor. Meloy does her research — either that, or she’s lived many lives — but it never feels as if she included information just because, by God, she spent time unearthing it and now wants to make use of her hard work. Rather, she includes tidbits about, say, the playing cards used in raffles at the nuclear power plant because they’re organic to the stories.

Though it might seem strange to praise a writer for the things she doesn’t do, what really sets Meloy apart is her restraint. She is impressively concise, disciplined in length and scope. And she’s balanced in her approach to character, neither blinded by love for her creations, nor abusive toward them. In an allusion to the collection’s title, a character wonders near the end, “What kind of fool wanted it only one way?” The person asking this question is a man considering leaving his smart, appealing wife of 30 years for the much younger woman who gave swimming lessons to his now-grown children. Such a man isn’t particularly likable — in fact, the opposite — but it’s a mark of Meloy’s evenhanded character development that you find yourself agreeing with him, thinking, Yeah, what kind of fool? In the end, everyone in these stories retains at least a sliver of humanity, whether it’s an 87-year-old who in her youth cheerfully appeared in movies under the Nazi studio system or a father who wordlessly offers his teenage daughter as sexual enticement to persuade a plaintiff to remain in a lawsuit.

Meloy’s restraint also comes through not in the way she plots stories, which is boldly, but in how she chooses to reveal her plots, delivering shocking twists in as low-key a manner as possible. In “The Girlfriend,” the fact that the protagonist’s daughter was murdered is revealed in an aside. In “Two-Step,” Naomi, a medical resident, talks to her friend Alice about Alice’s suspicion that her husband is having an affair; and though the story is told from Naomi’s perspective, it doesn’t become clear until nearly halfway through that she’s the one with whom the husband is cheating. Meloy drops this bomb understatedly, noting of Naomi that “she had told her husband that she was leaving him, with the understanding that Alice would simultaneously — or at least soon — be told the same thing. It had been a difficult week.”

Thanks to Meloy’s spare, subdued style, the death and infidelity running through these tales don’t take on as grim a tone as you’d expect. Only one story, about the murdered daughter, really makes you want to slit your wrists; and, indeed, a wry humor appears regularly. An Argentine aristocrat observes that another man “was a bore; not even failure could make him interesting.” Or, as one wife tells another, “the whole soul mates idea . . . is really most useful when you’re stealing someone’s husband. It’s not so good when someone might be stealing yours.”

Meloy is also the author of two interconnected novels and an earlier collection, “Half in Love.” Personally, I prefer her stories — “Half in Love” is wonderful too — but she’s such a talented and unpredictable writer that I’m officially joining her fan club; whatever she writes next, I’ll gladly read it.

Curtis Sittenfeld’s most recent novel is “American Wife.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/books/review/Sittenfeld-t.html?_r=1