BOOKS
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Themes and characters move into one another from story to story . Life is
too short, moving too quickly (all of us going in private directions) to do all
the things one means to do . " Living " is about a missed connection , about the
distraction of being caught up in one 's own life . At the stan, a friend, Ellen,
calls Faith , the narrator of the story, to announce that she 's dying. Faith re–
ports, not altogether metaphorically, that she's dying too . Ellen dies ; Faith
recovers , her own dying (and living) precluding involvement in Ellen's. At the
end, Faith comes to an abrupt realization of her friend's death and , corres–
pondingly, the implications of her own survival. The economy of the story-it
runs barely two and a half pages-makes it all the more powerful , avoiding, as
Paley almost always does, easy emotional appeals or inflated sentiment.
"The Burdened Man" also deals with survival and renewal. A man ,
anxious about money , which is to say loss of self, becomes friends , outgrowth
ofa public fight, with a neigh bor's wife. " Now ," he decides , " it was time to
consider different ways to begin to make love to her." He goes to the woman's
house one Sunday and is confronted by her husband, a policeman , who shoots
up the kitchen and wounds the burdened man . Passion and survival unbur–
den the title character of his displaced obsessions . "Until old age startled him,
he was hardly unhappy again . "
These brief accounts of narratives do limited justice to the special ness of
Paley's stories. Her sentences are small miracles of their own, risky, decep–
tively simple, capable of unexpected [Urns and flights . For example :
He leaned over the rail and tried
to
hold her eyes . But that is hard
to
do for eyes are born dodgers and know a whole circumference of ways out
of a bad SpOt.
He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a
narrow remark which, like a plum ber 's snake , could work its way through
the ear down the throat , halfway to my heart.
Paley is a major writer working in what passes in our time as a minor
form. Her short fiction has continually deceived media, that system of mirrors
that tends to discover the very things it advertises to itself, into taking it for less
than it is. "A Conversation with my Father," my favorite of the second
collection, concerns itself in part with the making of fiction. The narrator's
father asks her why she doesn't write simple stories like de Maupassant or
Chekhov. "Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to
them next." To please her father, to prove the task hopeless, she offers him
(and us) in abbreviated form a plain story , a self-fulfilling failure since the
narrator holds that ' ' Everyone, real or imagined , deserves the open destiny of
life ." The father complains that she leaves everything out, and Paley 's nar-
