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| Jul 29, 2010 - 06:42 PM |
Queen City News - Helena's FREE Weekly Newspaper |
Helena, Montana |
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In her short-story collection, “Half in Love,” Maile Meloy displays an uncommon ability to take her readers to the center of her character’s lives with an economy of words. In the story, “Four Lean Hounds, CA. 1976,” a friend of the protagonist, Hank, dies, and “...the funeral was in a cemetery so forgotten that it was just a field, grown over with sweetgrass and bitterroot. They’d fought the mortuary to be allowed to take Duncan there themselves, in a pine box loaded in his own pickup truck. Hank helped dig the grave, and the sky threatened rain. His wife, Demeter, was stoned. She was at her worst when she was stoned, and she’d been at her worst a lot in the days since Duncan had died.”
Time and again, Meloy takes the reader to a point in the ordinary lives of rather ordinary people where the ground rules suddenly change. Hank and Duncan had been business partners and, along with their wives, close friends. It isn’t until after Duncan has died that he discovers that his friend and his wife’s lives were intertwined in ways that he was unaware of. And in this revelation resonates the realization that his marriage, his friendship, his life, were not what he thought they were.
Less-competent storytellers might be tempted to shoot fireworks at moments like this. Meloy, however, rarely overstates her case. Rather, with welcome austerity, the tension in the story is allowed to diffuse into the fabric of the character’s lives.
An American soldier stationed in England spends an evening with a young woman:
“The stars were bright with the streetlamps dark, and no one walked by. They sat a long time saying nothing, and then the girl lay back on the hard stoop and put her hands behind her head like a pillow, and Red did the same. ‘I’m going to France in the morning,’ he said, after a while. It surprised him to think she didn’t already know. She looked over at him. She was close enough to kiss if he sat up a little, but he didn’t want that. He just wanted her lying there. Her eyes were solemn. ‘It’s going to be worse than you know,’ she said.”
Death figures prominently in 11 of the 14 stories in “Half in Love,” and Meloy’s storytelling is well-suited to the subject. Our media are so concentrated on the shock value of violence, the sales value of a violent death, that in many ways we have lost touch with the more ordinary ways in which a death has the possibility to affect our lives. With quiet understatement, Meloy brings the reader to the points of transition in her characters’ lives and then steps back as her characters reckon what the fallout will be. Well-crafted short stories should lead the reader to contemplation and reflection, and Meloy is successful on this count in most of this collection.
Most of the stories in “Half in Love” are set in the West, and locals will enjoy reading stories that take place in and around Helena. However, a notable point to be made about these stories is that they make no effort to evoke the mythic West of John Wayne. Instead, local readers will have the distinct feeling that the characters in “Half in Love” are the people who were sitting at the next table over at the No Sweat Cafe or standing ahead of them in line at Vann’s. It’s a rendering of the West that rings true rather than the forced contrivance of, for example, Annie Proulx’s “Wyoming Stories.”
There are two stories in “Half in Love” that are noticeably weaker than the rest of the collection. You won’t need to search painstakingly for gems in this collection, though; several of these stories have previously been published in some of North America’s best-known magazines and literary periodicals including The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and The Paris Review. That’s an extremely tough collection of editors for an aspiring writer to get noticed by, and Meloy’s work has been chosen for publication for good reason. Why note that here? Because Maile Meloy is a Helenan by birth, and we at the Queen City News would never want to be accused of false boosterism. Certainly, should Meloy be invited to return to her hometown for a public reading at, say, the Myrna Loy, it would be an event not to be missed.
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The Queen City News is published every Wednesday in Helena, MT, by Mossback Media, LLC.
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