Customer Reviews

Half in Love : Stories

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I worry that most young writers today rely on too many words and a sort of pseudo-intellectual babble to make themselves appear competent. That is not the case with Maile Meloy. She simply tells it like it is. While her stories go deep, she does not need to force feed us. We get it. We get it because her characters, her words, and her emotions speak to us directly. If this is what Ms. Meloy can do for the short story, I will hold my breath for her first novel.

Maile Meloy writes with clarity, economy and honesty of emotion. Such precision in fiction reminded me of some of Carver's stuff, and if Meloy's writing is to represent some kind of resurgence in minimalism, neo-minimalism or whatever, I'm all for it. (Especially having read some horrible, maximalist 'post-post-modern' fiction of some young American novelists.)

Meloy has an interesting way of unfolding a story. At first, there is an unusual and complex external situation that informs the readers of the characters and setting of the story. And just when the reader expects the story to be about that external situation, Meloy subverts that expectation by telling a story that is more private and introspective. It's a narrative technique that is subtle - one that offers an intelligent and realistic epiphany.

There are some stories when Meloy overreaches and the mechanisms of the story are too transparent. "Ice Harvester", although poetic, reads somewhat like a fiction workshop story that goes through the expositional work only to serve a bland insight. "Paint" also has its effective virtues, but the story of a man dying on his own porch as his wife goes to sleep unaware is too clunky a mechanism to tell a story of a couple who fail to communicate.

Aside from these minor gripes, though, I found these stories profoundly well-written and perfectly judged. And fun to read, as well! "The Last White Slave" is a narrative tour de force, a narrative within a narrative, that tells its tale of morality and character of human love with a propulsive power.

The stories dealing with life in Montana are beautiful as are other stories that take elsewhere, in another time. Meloy writes about big, everyday things - contemplation of mortality, strains of love, and efforts and failures to do good - but writes about these big themes in a colloquial that we can all understand and sympathize with. Her most admirable virtue is the ability to write with a penetrating insight and empathy for her characters - a heartbreaking earnestness for people in general that I haven't encountered in short fiction since George Saunders. This is a work of a major writer.

This is a wonderful book. The stories are all great; beautifully observed without being self-consciously literary. How nice to read a new writer who doesn't rely on gimmicks, self-promotion, or trendy topics; just solid and sincere storytelling. The book's flawed characters already feel like old friends. Definitely buy this one now; you may be looking at a classic.

This is a collection of short stories, by Montana born author Maile Meloy. I knew nothing about the book, and it was recommended by a colleague at work, who graduated in English from Princeton.

I don't believe I have read a short story since High School (To Build a Fire), even then I read them discretely, so reading an entire book of short stories was a shock to my reading sensibilities. One of the reasons I read is to become lost in the story and with short stories, well they are short, so the experience is something entirely different. I think with short stories (at least ones this short), the sensation was for me more visceral. After reading them since their breadth was narrow I could stop and ponder them, their meaning and the feeling they invoked. However since there were so many stories, it was difficult to just sit down and read one right after another. Each new story was an entirely different set of characters, different context and setting; it was difficult to be able to shift gears between stories. I had to often pause and allow time for settling before reading the next story.

There were several themes that I observed acros the stories, first was a sense of life in Montana, the general attitude of its inhabitants towards life, nature and new comers. There was also as the title suggests a great deal said and unsaid about love. Every relationship was poignantly troubled in some regard, "half in love" is not half way there, but a relationship that never made it and never will or one that was and is half way gone. I don't believe there was any tale where the couple was truly happy. Even in the moving story of Kite Whistler Aquamarine where a man desperately struggles to save a filly born in the dead of winter and frost bitten, his wife has no admiration for his love and dedication to the horses, more she seems annoyed and disdainfully judgmental. Having said that I did not find the book depressing, and I enjoyed so much diversity, variety and interest across so many stories in such a short book.

One thing that did bother me about the physical layout of the book was that the left page title had the authors name and the right page title had the book's name. This made it difficult to know what was the name of the short story you were reading, and it made a particular short story hard to find.

...

Like a great dish with finely balanced flavors and hints of the exotic and unexpected, this collection of short stories delivers in satisfying and enticing ways. Not a fan of short fiction, I only put this collection on my wish list after hearing the author read on NPR. A year or so later, I received the slim volume as a gift, and I am so delighted I strayed from the my norm to read it.

Meloy's prose is spare, direct, concise, but so refined and honed that her characters have an immediacy about them. These are people you know, people who walk past you daily. Some of the storylines have similar content -- the West, horses, farm life -- but the characters' stories are uncomparable in content and richness. You want more, but as each story concludes, I was left feeling full, feeling that I had been told the whole story.

I am looking forward to reading her novel next.

I first read Maile Meloy's "Ranch Girl" in The New Yorker and loved it, even writing it up and excerpting a passage on my personal site. I had Half in Love on my wishlist for months before it was released and purchased it as soon as it was available.

Meloy has a real gift for capturing characters' hovering on decision, change, disappointment, and many other ambivalent emotions that defy judgment or easy answers. Not every story in this collection works -- sometimes you lose track of where she's going or don't really believe the characters -- but the ones that do will make you glad you spent a few minutes with them.

Half in Love started a little slow for me, but then I grew to enjoy the sharp razor focus Meloy has in looking at snapshot moments of her characters lives. She's great at character development and story telling. I love the natural environments, and the sense of mystery and wildness in her writing. She takes a moment and creates a panoramic view of the charcters life, leaving the reader still to the fascinations of where the story might lead.

Maile Meloy is truly a master of her craft. I have read many of stories by this author and I am always amazed by how easily she is able to grip my attention from the very first sentence and carry me along with her for the entire journey, and this collection of stories is no different. They are touching, poignant and gripping. They change the way you look at and think about life and daily experiences. Meloy's stories stay with you long after they are completed and you have put the book back on the shelf. Each story is raw with emotion and really allows you understand the character's thought process in a short space of time. Meloy never shies away from the gruesome side of life, the natural turn of events, telling things the way they are in a way that most people would run away from. However, Meloy does this in such a way that you cannot help but turn the next page and see what she has in store for you next. The locales Meloy takes you to are by no means exotic, but they are not all dull or boring. Anything by this author is a must read for any short story lover.

Fourteen great stories mostly set in the American ranching west with female protagonists.. I was reminded of Judy Blunt's wonderful "Breaking Clean" and Willa Cather. There's a lot of death and illness (these westerners tend to be accident-prone) but Meloy's character observations are so sharp that a lot of humor shines though. She writes well about the unfairness of Workmen's Compensation and improved my opinion of ee cummings.
This may sound a little patronizing but she becomes less successful when she steps outside her native territory. One story is set in France and one in wartime England and one in Greece and Saudi-Arabia. These three are very good but not quite as gripping. Perhaps it's a matter of context. Some writers, like Hemmingway or Somerset Maugham seem able to globetrot without missing a beat.

This fine collection of stories is set mostly in Montana and were originally published in periodicals such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Ontario Review. Many have the sharply detailed yet emotionally elusive quality of New Yorker fiction, for example the first two stories, "Tome" and "Four Lean Hounds, ca. 1976."

In the first, a lawyer must deal with a disabled client who takes hostage a young employee of the state agency that has handled his case. The ironic details and the unpredictable turns of plot provide a wonky comic surface to an undertone of sad melancholy. There's melancholy also in the second story, as a young husband discovers at the funeral of a dead business partner that his friend and his wife have had a clandestine affair.

The troubled relationships between husbands and wives are a theme that runs through most of the stories. In "Gunnison Junction," a pregnant not-yet-married woman recognizes the impulse to walk away from her husband-to-be without looking back. The same couple reappears 15 years later in "Thirteen & a Half," parents of an adolescent now and at odds over how to react to the presence of a runaway with a gun in their midst, being pursued by the local police.

In "Paint," a husband lies dying after an accident on the deck he's refinishing, while inside the house, his wife cannot hear his pleas for help. In "The River," set in Utah, an older man and his ailing wife's friend are unable to penetrate her refusal to acknowledge her failing health.

For the most part, characters spring clearly from the page, the Montana settings are especially vivid, and the stories are well told, well paced, and fiercely focused on the human condition and the sadness of the situations that ordinary people's lives have led them to. Also recommended: Richard Ford's "Rock Springs."