Current Reading: Grace Paley

If you were to list some of the important post World War II American writers you might list Bellow, Malamud, Roth, Updike, Salinger, Heller, James Michener, E.B. White. If you were to focus on short stories you might list Ray Bradbury, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Cheever, as well as Ann Beattie and Joy Williams. 

Let me suggest that Grace Paley belongs on that list. Here is what Joyce Carol Oates said about her:

How aptly named: Grace Paley. For "grace" is perhaps the most accurate, if somewhat poetic, term to employ in speaking of this gifted writer who has concentrated on short, spare fiction through her career of nearly five decades. First published in 1959 with the slender volume The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley immediately drew an audience of readers who were not only admiring but loving. Her subsequent collections of stories—Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985)—confirmed Paley's reputation as a lyricist of the domestic life, a poet in prose whose ear for the Jewish-American vernacular suggests a kinship with her older contemporaries Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow.

Like Flannery O'Connor, another American original who came of age in the 1950s, Grace Paley has concentrated upon short fiction, and her major work is assembled in a single, not extraordinarily hefty volume. (Paley began writing as a poet, but published no volume of poetry until Begin Again, 1993. Her miscellaneous essays, articles, reports, and public addresses have been collected in Just As I Thought, 1998.) Paley's reasons for not attempting longer, more ambitious and technically challenging forms of fiction include a defense of political activism: "Art is too long, and life is too short. There's a lot more to do in life than just writing." How much more there has been in Grace Paley's life, touched upon briefly, and often elliptically, in such stories as "Faith in a Tree," "The Expensive Moment," and "Listening," is suggested by Paley's self-portrait as a "member of an American movement, a tide really, that rose out of the civil-rights struggles of the fifties, rolling methods and energy into the antiwar, direct-action movements in the sixties, cresting, ebbing as tides do, returning bold again in the seventies and eighties in the second wave of the women's movement—and from quite early on splashed and salted by ecological education, connection, and at last action." (Just As I Thought)

And here is what George Saunders said about Paley

Grace Paley is one of the great writers of voice of the last century. There’s an experience one has reading a stylist like her that has to do with how rich in truth the phrase-or-sentence-level bursts are and how quickly they follow upon one another. An image or phrase finds you, pleases you with its wit or vividness, shoehorns open your evolving vision of the fictive world, and before that change gets fully processed, here comes another. You find yourself having trouble believing this much wit is washing over you. A world is appearing before you that is richer and stranger than you could possibly have imagined, and that world gains rooms and vistas and complications with every phrase. What you are experiencing is intimate contact with an extraordinary intelligence, which causes the pleasant sensation of one’s personality receding and being replaced by the writer’s consciousness.

Paley’s approach is to make a dazzling verbal surface that doesn’t so much linearly represent the world as remind us of its dazzle. Mere straightforward representation is not her game. In fact, she seems to say, the world has no need to be represented: there it is, all around us, all the time. What it needs is to be loved better. Or maybe: what we need is to be reminded to love it, and to be shown how, because sometimes, busy as we get trying to stay alive, loving the world slips our mind.