Like the Alice Munro collection I read earlier in the year, this is not a book I would have found satisfying in my twenties, when I wanted cohesion and conclusiveness, a beginning, middle, end, and some adventure, too, preferably with a happy ending. These stoires are a little more sad, a little more abrupt, have a little too much reality in them. Maybe that’s why I have started reading more short stories–I already know the tropes, I want to see how they appear to someone else.
This collection is full of relationships, false starts, lust, and conflicting emotion. Meloy is definitely at her best when when her characters have painted themselves into a corner. I think the weakest of these stories were the most rambling (the second story, in particular, about the lawyer and the client and the daughter on a rafting trip–it was the only story that seemed just too convoluted.) I can’t quite put my finger on what was kept me reading story after story. Some stories are much more emotional than others, much more dramatic, but there are some that are just simple and sweet, so the variety keeps it interesting. I particularly enjoyed the one about the dead grandmother who turns out not to be dead–funny, poignant, and serious all at once.
Rating: 4/5. It’s nice when a collection of short stories is this readable–usually there’s at least one dud, right? And there’s something so honest about Meloy’s prose. She knows when to end a story, leaving it just ambiguous enough. It’s like she knows when you can make a solid guess as to what comes next; she knows that in the last fifteen minutes you’ve seen enough of the characters to understand them, and then she stops, because she’s told you enough. You’ve been around–you know how this goes.
Minus one star for the repetition in theme: lots of people in these stories agonizing over affairs and/or wallowing in lechery. After a few I caught myself thinking, “Is this story ALSO about a dude having an affair…?” and it was too bad to be yanked out of the mood like that.
