Enormous Exuberance At The Last Minute
Reading Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes At The Last Minute this weekend, I was amused in light of recent discussions by her willingness to use exclamation points. Some of them seem ironic and Internet-y (which I think she would appreciate—a medium military in origin, propagating OMGs and long cats), others as exuberant as Whitman. She’s as exuberant about sentences as about people; she knows how to twist context and jumble us up along with her. What is one to do, at last, with sentences packed this tightly semi non-sequiturs but marvel:
I wanted to stop and admire the long beach. I wanted to stop in order to think admiringly about New York. There aren’t many rotting cities so tan and sandy and speckled with citizens at their salty edges. But I had already spent a lot of life lying down or standing and staring. I had decided to run.
Which she does, until she gets to her childhood neighborhood, where people trump her plan and she stays for a couple of weeks. People do strange things in Paley stories. I sometimes feel as though they do what she wishes real life people would do, which could come off as didactic but mostly to me felt playful, and bobbing in the noise of an older New York that whatever might cloy was one of too many sounds to label. The violence of “The Little Girl” is something else entirely—composed from real events that were related to Paley by a friend she knew through the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and anchored firmly in the narrator’s Ancient Mariner-like need to tell us what he inadvertently enabled.
The Guardian’s excellent 2004 profile quotes AS Byatt comparing Paley with Alice Munro, “who puts her stories together in the same way, crafting them from a mass of recollected and rearranged material into a form.” I have been reading Munro’s Selected Stories, earlier works up through the mid 1990s and the same comparison occurred to me. The density of Paley’s prose can make her seem hyper, and, conversely, her refusal to pursue conventional conflicts and plot-lines can seem meandering, but like Munro she draws pathos from the sheer fact of time, and how at different points we are no longer who were were. One of my writing instructors once told our class that time itself wasn’t subject enough for a story. How can you have “time itself”? To a Paley story, time is like light, giving the shape and color, and shown by the things it reveals.
