Half in Love

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 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.

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.

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.

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.