Collected Stories, Grace Paley

...There she becomes a quasi-pnsoner in what was once her home, where RussianYiddish accents have been replaced by black voices putting her in her place, and where she is both trapped and enthralled by fear, discovery, and longing...

...Full-bodied is perhaps the operative word here, because while Paley's stories often read more like poems or even oneact plays, they are distinctly composed of flesh and blood The most vital of her characters, the one who keeps raising her voice again and again, is a woman named Faith I think of her as Paley's voice, if not necessarily the embodiment of her actual experience Never, perhaps, has a writer's alter ego been so aptly named "I myself, although I lost God a long time ago, have never lost faith," she says in one of "Two Short Sad Stones from a Long and Happy Life," the one that begins cryptically, "There were two husbands disappointed by eggs," but tells us all we need to know about the man who made two sons and the man who raised them...

...But immediately she saw that this baby wasn't Samuel She and her husband together have had other children, but never again will a boy exactly like Samuel be known " Such simple eloquence is Paley at her best Although many of Paley's stones are what the theater calls kitchen dramas, the author (who is well-known for her social and political activism) has the brashness and confidence to reach far out into the world...

...Here Paley may be describing her essential self I move the pots of mangolds aside Then I'm able to lean on my elbow way out into unshadowed visibility Once, not too long ago, the tenements were speckled with women like me in every third window up to the fifth story, calling the children from play to receive orders and instruction...

...STORIES THAT ARE POEMS COLLECTED STORIES Grace Paley Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27 50, 386 pp Belhe Duf resne Grace Paley tells us in the introduction to this shortstory collection that she grew up reading and writing poetry, but somewhere in the mid-1950s she found that the form no longer suited her A simple switch to straightforward prose did not provide the solution The stones she wanted to tell— needed to tell—about men and women required some further invention So Paley (although she does not tell us this) discovered her true voice, the voice of a poet, and fleshed out her poems into fullbodied scenes...

...Goodbye, they said once more, and set off in pnde on paths which are not my concern " Faith doesn't preach Because Faith is absent from many of the stones, we don't have the opportunity to tire of her In any event, she is never tiresome, even when her children wear her out An early story, when Faith's boys are young and she cannot detach one of them from her long enough to think, ends soarmgly with her cradling the boy in her arms "Then through the short fat fingers of my son, interred forever, like a black-andwhite-barred king in Alcatraz, my heart lit up in stnpes " A later story, "The Long-Distance Runner," begins with indifferent sons, old enough for parting from their mother, an indifferent boyfriend, and Faith's run for life through the streets of New York into the neighborhood of her own childhood...

...How they wound up together in Faith's kitchen one day is not nearly as important as how they leave it "Goodbye, I said, have a nice day...

...The night after the big day, Shirley goes to sleep with a clear conscience after shushing the voices of her proud parents in the next room...

...Sometimes, it's only a short reach out the window to remind an angry young father walking by with his daughter about the precarious position of the human race, as she does in "Anxiety...

...This memory enables me to say stnctly, Young man, I am an older person who feels free because of that to ask questions and give advice Other times, as in "Somewhere Else," Paley chronicles a long reach such as the one she made when she traveled with an American delegation to the People's Republic of China Although Paley's voice is a little heavier with experience in the later stories, it never loses the boldness of Shirley, the little Jewish girl in the early story, "The Loudest Voice," who disturbs the peace at home when she lands a starring role in the neighborhood Chnstmas pageant...

...There is no self-congratulation in those words, only the self-assurance that has kept Paley' s voice so true throughout the years...

...I expected to be heard...

...My voice was certainly the loudest," Paley wntes...

...Paley' s stones are best descnbed as revelations The publication of these fortyfive stones of faith, resilience, and chanty will no doubt entice more readers to discover what has for years delighted Paley fans, but the uninitiated should be forewarned—especially if they aren't poetry lovers—that this is not a volume to devour quickly As a newcomer to her work, I was frequently stopped in my tracks by a perfect phrase or image The down side is that you can easily get so caught up in the language that you lose your gnp on the story line Great poetry (and these stories are great poetry) arrests us that way, which is why poems are typically bnef Paley's careful, intncate craftsmanship is bnlhant in small doses but can get a little connived and muddled in some of her longer stones It may be necessary for complete comprehension to read them over and over again, but poetry was always meant to be lingered over Paley does not move the reader along with a great narrative swell, yet when 33 she's humming it's amazing how much vitality she can squeeze into a character in such a small space, and how she makes us care so deeply about people we barely know Take the very short story "Samuel," about a boy who wasn't afraid of anything, who hopped a ride on the platform between locked subway cars and fell to his death when a man "whose boyhood had been more watchful than brave" became angry and pulled the emergency cord Paley reveals the tragedy of this death in the most unexpected way, by holding out hope, and then withdrawing it The hope rests with Samuel's mother, a young woman who quickly becomes pregnant again "The child born to her was a boy They brought him to be seen and nursed She smiled...