Summer evenings, in the days before Maya, Shanthala and I would go for a walk. If we both had had a long day, or sometimes because we were in the mood for it, or just plain lazy, we would have had dinner at some nearby restaurant. We were done with dinner usually by 7. With daylight lasting till 8.30 or so, we would easily spend an hour strolling the neighborhood.
Many days, we would be too sleep deprived and weary from work day stresses to talk much. As we strolled, I’d peek at the houses we passed. In most, the TV would be on in a darkened room. In some houses, where the kitchen had a window that faced the road, I’d see one or two people busy putting together a meal. Some had their curtains wide open providing a view of even their backyard. Sometimes, I’d see people seated around a dining table, with a bottle of wine, faces animated by conversation. In some others, I saw one or two older people, eating a meal in silence, their faces and bodies reflecting what I thought was the loneliness characteristic of many older people here in the civilized West.
Some days, I projected myself into their lives, carrying out entire conversations in my head. I wondered what their dreams were, what their fears were. Did they feel safe and secure about the future or did they worry about it ? Did they have healthy children or had they lost someone ? Were they planning their next vacation or just mulling over a stressful situation at work ? Were they planning a wedding or contemplating splitting up ? And when we travel, I often wonder what it is like to live in those other places. Does the verdant, lush vegetation make you feel different when you see it everyday ? Do the cold, majestic mountains and the weather they bring with them depress you or inspire you ?
One of the beauties of fiction is that it gives us a way to live other lives, to think strange thoughts, to engage in a conversation in a way that we do not in our real lives. And in great fiction, the inhabitation is not just more real, but it can also shed light on the human condition, say something deep, yet unspoken about our own lives.
Maile Meloy is one such writer whose works I’ve had the pleasure of spending time with recently. Actually, I read her debut collection of short stories, Half In Love, a year back and was so struck by it, that I read it again last week. I also read her second collection of short stories, the more recent, and almost impossible to get even after placing a hold on it at the library, Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It. It was through a review of this second book that I read in the NYT book section that I came to know of her.
Montana (flickr picture courtesy of Bitterroot)
Maile Meloy’s stories are usually set in Big Sky country, Montana. Her prose like the country has lots of spaces between. She doesn’t try and fill the description or the narrative as much as possible. So, her prose has an easy, relaxed style that seems to echo the beauty and austerity of the places she writes about, the wide open spaces. Here are some examples of how some of her stories begin:
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. He recovered, but his right hip never fit his socket, and his mother always thought that he would die young.
One January evening, when the doctor’s new house felt warm and inviolable against the wind and the cold outside, his younger brother called.
For eight months, I had been telling my client that he had no tort claim. Sawyer had worked construction for thirty years, building houses for people with Montana fantasies.
The first time Hank slept with Kay – the only time – was the night her husband drowned.
Winter was bad when it was just ordinary cold and dark and a smoky haze hung over town because everyone had woodstoves blazing in spite of the burning restrictions.
If you’re white, and you’re not rich or poor but somewhere in the middle, it’s hard to have worse luck than to be born a girl on a ranch.
With beautiful understatement, Meloy paints a picture of hard-scrabble existence in such places: getting polio when you weren’t supposed to, burning wood to keep warm because that’s all you could afford to, the wealthy outsiders with Montana fantasies. She never calls attention to the conditions or the characters. Blink and you can miss it. Similarly, the harsh winters are ever present in the background, but noticed with a few words, where some writers might devote entire pages.
Her stories are like William Stafford’s poems: very short, very haunting. The longest maybe 15 pages, but most are between 7 and 10 pages, with an above average print size. So, I browse through them fairly quickly, returning to read the story again, in some cases, because they are so luminous. If there’s a stereotype to her characters, it is that most of them speak very little, as we’ve come to expect of such people. Many stories are without a climactic denouement, the whole thing like a snapshot taken of someone’s life, or like the view someone like me might catch glancing through the open windows on summer evening strolls.
But her stories are not without their shocking moments, moments where one suddenly feels the chill of Montana winter intrude a summer interlude. Adulteries are revealed in “by the way” sentences such as “Now he thought about how you can not know the songs a man sings when he’s along with his little girl, or with your girl” or “Naomi had been cooked for, in a motel with a kitchenette, on crappy electric burners”. They’re in the middle of a narrative that you think is going in one direction that the sentence almost passes you by.
I think of Meloy as Montana’s Jhumpa Lahiri. Her prose like Lahiri’s (her’s is the name that springs to mind first, though there are others who write with this quality), never calling attention to itself, always deferring to the narrative, but so exquisitely nuanced if you can spot it. Sentences such as: “he walked as though he were turning to himself to ask a question” (about a man who has broken his hip and his legs several times) or “There might be decades left for him to not forgive himself” or “Leo was deformed by grief” or “You have to be young to play the guitar, unless you are very great.”
Like all great fiction, there are little nuggets of observations about life that I relished. For example:
There’s a look little girls have who are adored by their fathers, Bea said, It’s that facial expression of being totally impervious to the badness of the world. If they can keep that look into their twenties, they’re pretty much okay, they’ve got a force field around them.
He held his wife and felt himself anchored to everything that was safe and sure, and kept for himself the knowledge of how quickly he could let go and drift free.
“The whole soul mates idea”, Alice said bitterly, “is really most useful when you’re stealing someone else’s husband. It’s not so good when someone might be stealing yours”.
In grade school, it’s okay to do well. But by high school, being smart gives people ideas. Science teachers start bugging you in the halls. They say Eastern schools have Montana quotas, places for ranch girls who are good at math.
I tried reading her two long novels – the second is a sequel to the first – a year back but couldn’t find the same level of energy or beauty in them. Maybe it has more to do with me reading long novels than her writing.
The distractions of the web, the interruptions of a two year old, the background stress of work or a problem that you’re trying to solve, the stack of unpaid bills, the ideas for writing that are piled so high that you don’t write even a single one in despair, the guilt of the broken habit of running, the desire to spend more time with Shanthala, all conspire to a point where I lack the energy to rip into a great novel. At such times, poems and short stories like Maile Meloy’s provide the relief, the rejuvenation that I need.
Zoetrope has an entire story from Both Ways for reading on the web.
