Yesterday I read a short story collection by Maile Meloy entitled Half in Love.  Meloy writes stories that make my stomach and my heart ache.  She performs this trick through deft, clear writing and sure-cry situations. She writes about losers and losses and yearnings that can never be filled.  Her protagonists are doomed, fated, destined to a miserable conclusion after a half-fought battle. That’s the half of this collection, not half in love but half in fight: there is no more than half a fight in these characters because the battle is already lost.

Maybe Meloy is the kind of writer that cannot be read more than one story at a time; in smaller doses, maybe the misery would not have felt so manipulative. Although I like the way Meloy uses words, she uses her plots to make me feel a certain way (bad); her stories are a continuous visceral whipping and I tired of the beating.

As I read story after story, I grew tired of the repetition of hopelessness. Meloy could have mixed things up by creating a character or two who have a chance at something: they may blow that chance but at least make them open to the possibility of rising above their fate and achieving the bliss of  the unthinkable.  I want to read about characters who may surprise me, not ones playing the soap opera roles I can predict from the first low-down assessment.

Meloy writes with beautiful language and I would like to read stories by her that dropped the Greek tragedy bits and instead stuck to real life moments of small momentum.  Dead dogs, horses, people, and dreams should be left out and instead quiet moments of survival, acceptance, and peace could be explored.  Two of her stories, “Tome” and “Thirteen & a Half” did offer her characters a chance in the real world but even in these stories a bit of melodrama crept in (nevertheless, these were my two favorite pieces). How wonderful her stories would be if she would just use her steady skills to write about life outside the plotted line of melodrama.