BOOKS
315
tamed, the sense of mischief that kept breaking out of bounds, "this
wildness whereof it is spoken . .. an equal claim with sound to being
a poem's better half," those forces that do not love a wall.
PETER DAVISON
LATER AND ELSEWHERE
LATER THE SAME DAY. By Grace Paley.
Farrar, Straus,
&
Giroux.
$13.95.
ELSEWHERE. By Jonathan Strong.
Ballantine. $4.95.
Grace Paley continues to create an unfamiliar, and there–
fore uncomfortable, literary space. She is formally innovative but
outside recognizable avant-garde or experimental traditions . She is
leftist and feminist , but the mainspring of her fiction is not polemi–
cal; moreover, she avoids both the nineteenth-century realist forms
of the earnestly, coherently political and the postmodern absurd–
grotesque of the satirically, anarchically political. Her stories are rife
with the full-blown emotion unavailable (to be kind) to most con–
temporary "serious" American fiction by younger writers, but that
emotion, subjected to the complex dislocations of her sophisticated
forms, has nothing in common with the visceral experience offered
by bestsellers. Paley's forms do not announce themselves as sophisti–
cated, however, unlike those of an older generation - Paley's own–
of "serious" (male) American fiction writers. On the contrary, her
stories, in their aleatory digressiveness, appear casually structured,
almost formless (needless to say, they are carefully if unconven–
tionally structured). Paley, a true "cultural dreamer ," succeeds in
uniting the most productive literary and political counties of what
otherwise appear the blighted and divided realms of contemporary
American fiction. As she says herself in "The Expensive Moment";
But the evening belonged to the Chinese artists and writers ....
All sorts of American cultural workers were invited . Some laughed
to hear themselves described in this way. They were accustomed
to being called "dreamer poet realist postmodernist." They might
have liked being called "cultural dreamer," but no one had
thought of that yet.
