Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy

As American short stories go, those in Maile Meloy's second collection are both familiar and strange. There are the long journeys and epic snowfalls, and the small towns in a vast landscape where someone turns up, changes everything and moves on. There is also the language: practical, tough and somehow weather-proof. It could be cowboy, beatnik, hobo or hunter talk, but while Meloy is clearly interested in such types, she is thrillingly resistant to their romance.

In the opening story, "Travis, B", Chet – a cowboy of sorts – is so lonely he fixes on the first woman he meets. This happens to be Beth, who has made an 18-hour round trip to teach the class that Chet has wandered into. "I've never done anything so stupid in my life," she says. Chet also does the stupid thing. He wants more of a life but discovers he's not ready to live it: "He had wanted practice, with girls, and now he had gotten it, but he wished it felt more like practice."

Meloy's characters have just enough insight to convince themselves, like Chet, that they know what they're doing. Her eye is on the machinery of their moral operations as they are faced with the need for action or decision. The atmosphere is one of drift and routine over which darkness looms, reflecting the small-town setting of much of the book. One of the darkest stories is "Two Step", in which Alice confides in Naomi that she thinks her husband has a lover. He does and, what do you know, it's Naomi.

Just as we assume we know all the ways this can go, the story fractures and power starts changing hands like the present in a game of pass the parcel. The husband, caught out, refuses to react and instead starts acting. As Naomi observes: "He was acting like the man he wanted to be, in hopes that he could become it. He would keep acting until he couldn't stand it anymore, and then he would be the man he was." How astute she seems for the moment before she concludes: "then he would need her".

The fact we know we can't have things both ways doesn't stop us behaving as if we can. In "The Children", liberal parents discover something monstrous in the children they have encouraged to express their feelings and talk about anything. As the parents retreat into formality and certainty, we cannot tell how deliberate the teenagers' sabotage has been.

"O Tannenbaum" provides a bleak finale: a moral white-out in a snowbound landscape where a family pick up a couple of hitchhikers. At first they feel themselves preyed upon but, once again, power shifts along with the surfacing of desire, and they find a shockingly pragmatic solution to their various wants. As in every story here, no one is judged but everyone stands exposed. This includes the reader, for whom Meloy's pictures are so clear that we cannot help but see ourselves in them.

Lavinia Greenlaw's most recent book is The Importance of Music to Girls (Faber).