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PARTISAN REVIEW
But just as often as they function separately in Paley's work, prose
surface and story come together in the peculiar way of Mrs. Hegel–
Shtein's tears, in those moments when language must suddenly
distract the reader from pathos, misleading us about the primary
emotion of the fictional material. Again, in the best of those moments,
surface and feeling register on the one hand separately, as strangely
irreconcilable, and on the other harmoniously, as an irreducible lit–
erary epiphany.
Paley'Swork is honeycombed with such moments:
Eddie looked up and saw his father. Their eyes met and because of
irrevocable pain, held. That was the moment (said Shmul, later on
after that and other facts) that Eddie fell head-first into the black
heart of a deep depression. This despair required all his personal
attention for years.
He had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a
narrow remark which, like a plumber's snake, could work its way
through the ear down the throat, halfway to my heart. He would
then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment.
I own two small boys whose dependence on me takes up my lumpen
time and my bourgeois feelings .. . . When I'm not furiously ex–
hausted from my low-level job and that bedraggled soot-slimy
house, I praise God for them . One Sunday morning, my neighbor,
Mrs. Raftery, called the cops because it was 3 a.m . and I was
vengefully singing a praising song.
He took hold of me with his two arms as though in love and
pressed his body hard against mine so that I could feel him for the
last time and suffer my loss. Then he kissed me in a mean way to
nearly split my lip. Then he winked and said, "That's all for now, "
and skipped off into the future, duffel bags full of rags .
Air was filtering out of my two collapsing lungs. Water rose,
bubbling to enter, and I would have died of instantaneous
pneumonia-something I never have heard of-if my hand had not
got hold of a glass ashtray and, entirely apart from my personal
decision, flung it.
After that, Alexandra hoped every day for her father 's death, so that
she could have a child without ruining his interesting life at the very
end of it when ruin is absolutely retroactive.
At the heart of Paley's engagement with everyday life is her deep
empathy with her characters. Even the deserters and betrayers she
allows their "reasons," as she might say, and the rest she actively
