BOOKS
303
LIFE-SIZE
ENORMOUS CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE .
By Grace Paley.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $6.95 .
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
is not , as advertised by
some reviewers, inferior to
The Little Disturbances ofMan .
It
is a different
book by the same author (who , changed by life and time , is also a little differ–
ent here) , a continuation of the other, a further exploration . Where Grace
Paley 's first book , for all its originality and surprise, is a collection of by and
large traditionally made stories , the second is made up of a number of
seeming fragments , an indication not of haste ("art is too long and life is too
short ," the author modestly tells us) , but of a distillation of materials , a more
daring openness of form . Paley's titles,
The
Little
Disturbances of Man
(emphasis mine) and Enormous
Changes at the Last Minute,
playing off the
first , refer to size in an exaggerated, essentially ironic way . The author's char–
acterization of what she 's about, an occasion for the literal-minded to com–
plain she has not given us the major (meaning large) work we've been led to
expect , is a little like Cordelia's representation of her love to her father . Paley
is often at her best in
Enormous Changes-her
fiction at its most consequen–
tial- in the smallest space .
In
Enormous Changes,
as in the first collection , Paley writes about
families , about lost and found love , about divorce, death, ongoing life-the
most risky and important themes- in a style in which words count for much,
sometimes for almost all . The stories-in some cases, the same stories-deal
on the one hand with their own invention and , on the other, profoundly (and
comically) with felt experience . In this sense, and in a wholly unschematic
way, Paley combines what has been called the" tradition of new fiction" in
America with the abiding concerns of the old .
Grace Paley 's stories resist the intrusion of critical language about them,
make it seem , no matter what , irrelevant and excessive . The stories are hard to
write about because what they translate into has little relation, less than most
explication , to what they are: themselves, transformed events of the imagina–
tion. The voice of Paley's fiction-quirky , tough , wise-ass, vulnerable,
bruised into wisdom by the knocks of experience-is the triumph and defin–
ing characteristic of her art .
" An Interest in Life, " probably the best piece in
The Little Disturbances
of Man ,
and one of the best American stories of the past twenty-five years ,
illustrates Paley's mode . A story initially about a husband 's desertion of a wife
and four children , it opens : " My husband gave me a broom one Christmas .
