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PARTISAN REVIEW
This wasn ' t right. No one can tell me it was meant kindly." The matter-of–
fact , ironic voice of the protagonist, Ginny, distances the reader from the
conventions of her pathos , makes light of easy sentiment , only to bring us ,
unburdened by melodrama , to an awareness of the character as if someone
known to us intimately for a long time. Ginny, in a desperate moment, writes
out a list of her troubles to get on the radio show, "Strike it Rich." When she
shows the list to John Raftery , a returned former suitor unhappily married to
someone else , he points out to her that her troubles are insufficient, merely
" the little disturbances of man." Paley 's comic stories deal in exaggerated
understatement, disguise their considerable ambition in the modesty of wit .
"Distance" in
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
is a retelling of
some of the materials of" An Interest in Life " through the self-justifying (also
self-denying) point of view of Ginny's officious neighbor , Mrs . Raftery. "You
would certainly be glad to meet me ," Mrs . Raftery introduces herself, " I was
the lady who appreciated youth." The victories Mrs. Raftery claims for herself
are undermined by events, defeated by her own story. "Distance" begins in
self-assertion and ends with the narrator 's loneliness and mystification .
Time , or the shortness of time, is at issue in almost all of the stories in the
new collection. "Debts" is about the obligations writers have, or that the
narrator feels writers ought to have , to keep the people close to them alive by
giving voice to their stories and the stories of their families.
It
is an impossible
obligation- impossible like the' 'wants " of the story of that title- which the
narrator tries hopelessly (and successfully) to fulfi ll.
In "Wants," the narrator returns twO overdue books to the library-the
books overdue for eighteen years-and meets a former husband ; the meeting
and conversation are like a creation of the narrator's imagination , a day dream
or obsessive fantasy . What comes out of it for the woman is a catalogue of her
failures~her
best intentions , her' 'wants" defeated by fleeting time and the
ordinary, quirky circumstances of a life. The occasion for "Wants" is meta–
phoric , its details hyperbolic, but the story touches us through its humanity
and perception-Paley's vision like nothing else-as strongly as if it were
taking place in that literary convention we call the "real world."
An improvisatory casualness is another of the disguises of Paley's fiction.
A high degree of technical sophistication is its true condition. Paley's stories
rarely insist on their own achievement, deny their own audacity, her craft to
cover its own traces. To say that Paley is knowing as a writer is not to imply that
her work relies in any way , obvious or subtle , on formula . Each of Paley's
stories is a separate discovery , as ifshe begins again each time out to learn what
it is to make a story.
