Thoughts On Grace Paley
This week in my independent study we started Paley’s Collected Stories, and alongside my reactions I wanted to post the cover of the edition I am using, which though it doesn’t seem to me that I bought it so many years ago is already browning inwards from the corners.
Why scan a book cover when you can Google it, right? My laziness yielded a Google bonus: a copy with a Philip Roth endorsement that my copy lacks (did the publishers add it in a later edition, or decide it was better to do without it?). “Splendidly comic and unladylike,” Philip says. Which would never have occurred to me! In fact with most people I would wonder why anyone after 1903 or so would use “unladylike” as praise or at all, but this is Philip Roth so we know what he’s referring to.
But: let’s get crafty, shall we?
I read most of these stories with the cadences of the readings I went to Friday and Saturday night still in my head, the poetry and experimentally-inclined fiction (I’m thinking especially of Ben Kopel’s poems and Gabe Durham’s story, “The Subway Imitator”). Grace Paley’s sentences seem to anticipate these contemporary pieces’ rhythms and the way that they circle around their meanings. Indeed, chip away the numerous characters from a Paley story and one might be left with something very much like an Amy Hempel story—ultra-condensed rather than minimalist.
I’m especially interested in Paley’s sentences because of what she wrote in her introduction, that she’d been writing poetry since childhood and came to fiction because of “the storyteller’s pain: ‘listen! I have to tell you something!’ ”
Her style is at once boiled-down and fluid. In “The Loudest Voice,” after the opening that lets us know we’re going back into the narrator’s past, we get:
There, too, but just around the corner, is a red brick building that has been old for many years. Every morning the children stand before it in double lines which must be straight. They are not insulted. They are waiting anyway (p 35).
The first two sentences have basically the same structure, a main clause with a modifying clause attached by “that” or “which.” Both modifiers contain compressed time. The first one lets us know that the building was old even in Shirley (the narrator’s) memory, also with a suggestion of neglect (would one speak of a building in tip-top shape as being old?) The second modifier contains the teachers’ reprimands and all the mornings the children have stood there. The lack of insult the children feel seems to me to cast this firmly into the distinctive Paley point of view, slightly stylized and slightly collective. Any number of paragraphs are equally dense, at once carefully wrought and so much their own idiom that they strike my ear as the effusions of real voices.
What I mean by collective is how characters all partake of the same occasional flights of figurative language—which never strikes me as pretty but rather as sharp—as if they’re all from the same neighborhood; the way close-knit groups of friends know one another’s slang. Junot Diaz must have read Grace Paley thoroughly. In the first few stories this plus the lack of physical description occasionally made the characters blend together. It was like listening to a recital while blindfolded. As I grew more accustomed to it—and as Paley, maybe, smoothed out the pace at which she throws characters at us—I mainly marveled at its efficiency. Cindy is “the shiny daughter of cash in the bank” (p 67); “Mother and Joanna had wrapped their lonesome arms around each other and gone to sleep” (p 18). It’s all so rapid-fire. Describing Cindy, we get Charles’s (the narrator) fraught attitude and physical attraction, plus the expository detail that she’s the child of rich parents. Arms, of course, can’t be lonesome, but by mis-applying the adjective Paley suggests a posture, an explanation, and Josephine’s point of view. Paley gets a lot of mileage applying emotional descriptors to inanimate objects.
Paley uses ambiguity in a way that’s admired in poetry and appears less in fiction: “I heard the thumping tail of a conversation” (p. 22). Does she mean temporally, that the conversation is ending, or physically, the sound? Both work.
She also puts homely aphorisms to good use, declarations of characters’ beliefs. She intersperses different kinds of sentences and juxtaposes ‘high’ and ‘low’ language:
The rabbi’s wife said, “It’s disgusting!” But no one listened to her. Under the narrow sky of God’s great wisdom she wore a strawberry-blond wig (p 37).
Such a terrific non-sequitor! The mention of the wig makes sense via association, since we’re talking about the rabbi’s wife, but the wife doesn’t appear in a real ‘scene’ as such, so we don’t need the detail, and following “no one listened” it seems offered as an explanation for the not listening, or as an additional reason to discount her.
I suppose these stories would be classified as Realism. They obey the laws of physics and a cast walks through them who would be familiar to Chekhov or Carver (and with their scant physical detail they’re maybe as similar to Chekhov’s plays as his stories). With their quickness, their informality, their frankness and yet lyricism, there’s an inarguable force to them. You might as well workshop the wind. The plots are straightforward, and epiphanies or twists do not strike me as noticeably altering the dramatic energy. The stories simply stop when they are done. I suppose, what more do you need when you have life?
