220
PARTISAN REVIEW
as the absolute end of the known world quickly through detonation
or slowly through the easygoing des truction of natural resources,
they
are
still,
everi
now, optimistic, humorous, and brave. In fact,
they intend enormous changes at the last minute.
Tentatively and comically, Paley offers fiction's "enormous changes"
as a warbling coun ternote to the tragic gong, even in twen tieth cen tury
political life, that notoriously unredeemed domain.
The tragic subject matter of Paley's work reaches the reader
emotionally as pathos, a tricky entity because it so easily becomes
sentimental. However, pathos remains pathos in Paley's work: she
jerks no tears but neither does she freeze them . Instead, she distracts the
reader from pathos at dangerous moments, when sentimen tality threat–
ens, by calling attention
to
her wildly inventive, comic language and
imagery. In those moments when her language takes on the burden of
simultaneously communicating and distracting from pathos, Paley
creates a unique and fascinating literary object.
In "Faith in the Afternoon"
(Enormous Changes),
Faith, recently
abandoned by her husband, is visiting her parents in their old people's
home, "The Children of Judea." Faith 's mother belongs to the
"Grandmothers' Wool Socks Association, " governed by the formidable
Mrs. Hegel-Shtein, who rolls noiselessly in and out of everyone's
privacy "on oiled wheelchair wheels." Mrs. Hegel-Shtein is an ineluc–
table and pitiless purveyor of sad stories. She forces Faith's mother,
who wants to spare her daughter more unhappiness, to discuss the
tragic fates of various of Faith's childhood friends, beginning with
Tess Slovinsky, whose first child was a "real monster," and:
"[The
second) was born full of allergies. It had
rashes
from orange
juice.
It
choked from milk. Its
eyes
swoll up from going to the
country. All right. Then
her
husband , Arnold Lever, a very pleasant
boy, got a cancer.
They
chopped off a finger.
It
got
worse. They
chopped off a hand.
It
didn 't help. Faithy, that was the end of a
lovely boy. That's the letter I got this morning just before you came."
Mrs. Darwin stopped. Then she looked up at Mrs. Hegel-Shtein
and Faith.
" He
was an only son," she said. Mrs. Hegel-Shtein gasp–
ed.
"You said an only son!"
Mrs. Hegel-Shtein is vulnerable to Arnold Lever's gruesome fate
through her love of her own "only son," Archie. Faith's mother tells
Arnold Lever's story from the great distance of the comic grotesque. He
does not represent the kind of pathos Paley is interested in: his is
sensational horror, not the unostentatious, commonplace pain of
