Husbands and Heroines
KAPP, ISA
Husbands and Heroines Enormous Changes at the Last Minute By Grace Paley Farrar Straus & Giroux 198 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Isa Kapp Unlike those writers who lost their identity, their sense of...
...You misunderstood me on purpose," her father persists...
...Instead of looking back in anger, the wife confides to us that she did want something: "I wanted to be married forever to my ex-husband or my present one," and she muses appreciatively, "You couldn't exhaust either man's qualities or get under the rock of his reasons in one short life...
...The characters in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute are at the brink of politics somewhat in the same sense that those in The Little Disturbances of Man were at the brink of love...
...Yet sometimes she goes overboard in her urge to give credit...
...Reviewed by Isa Kapp Unlike those writers who lost their identity, their sense of humor or the ground they stood on in the '60s, Grace Paley maintains a gallant line of distinction between the world's mistakes and her own state of mind...
...At the very moment most New Yorkers are clutching their purses and triple-locking their doors, we find her, chubby, middle-aged and clad in undershirt and silk shorts, practicing long-distance running on Brooklyn's Ocean Parkway, true mistress of the urban pastoral...
...She possesses, among female writers, perhaps the strongest sense of fraternity with her own gender...
...in politics, that lack of completeness only aggravates our general condition of dilletantism...
...Wanting to cheer him up, Faith accommodatingly switches the woman's state from doomed drug addict to busy receptionist in a storefront community clinic...
...Paley's stories will, in any case, not do so for their "literary merit" (of which there is sufficient amount) but for her disposition, which is remarkable...
...Paley does not have it in her to practice a sullen art, and seems almost oddly unwilling to entertain an adverse moral judgment or a hostile response...
...When will you look it in the face...
...Her ladies, diligent bibliographers of each other's pregnancies and domestic woes, band together in spirit, all in one way or another deserted by their men yet somehow sturdy and resilient in their solitude...
...I suppose it is her happy susceptibility to people unlike herself that has given Mrs...
...The Long Distance Runner" recaptures in a startling way an experience we all share, at least in fantasy, of coming back to a house we once lived in and extracting from the present occupants some recognition of our metaphysical impact on the premises...
...Paley's capricious ways with short story technique in her second book...
...She again disturbs the narrative out of sheer good will when she draws all sorts of social and political reverberations into the stories at random...
...He represents, apparently, an infectious new breed that Mrs...
...Over and over, husbands fly the coop for reasons of their own, but the women do not hold a grudge...
...But as for you, it's too late...
...Faith in the Afternoon" is a humorous, compassionate story about a daughter's visit to her parents in an old-age home, at a moment in her life when she is too unhappy to cope with their parental anxiety...
...Paley seems to lose the argument about modern story technique, she makes a telling point: Despite great empathy and great effort, it is hard to reconcile different ways of looking at life...
...When she elaborates, the situation grows real enough for him to over-identify with the heroine's lonely fate and become depressed...
...When have you seen a fatter ass...
...I wanted a sailboat," he recalls, "but you didn't want anything...
...Now, however, her father is thoroughly disappointed at the arbitrary shift in mood, and berates her for being a joker...
...Paley such attentive ears for black speech, and has turned "The Long Distance Runner" into an acceptant and offbeat glimpse into black slum life...
...In a period when liber-ationists believe female happiness can be articulated in the form of pragmatic demands, this kindly fatalism alone would make the writer extraordinary...
...Before the reader can believe it, she has moved in to her old apartment with a Mrs...
...And she is so friendly and stoical in bringing this disheartening truth to our attention, that I begin to wonder whether it is really fair to subject her to the rather priggish standards of reviewing????A field where mammoth indifference to the content and character of fiction (and drama) is often matched by fastidious concern about minuscule impediments of style...
...In "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute," another middle-aged lady, with a nice face and a special solicitude for junkies (for whom she keeps nourishing beef dinners stacked in her freezer), seems to be completely snowed by a curly-haired hippie cab driver...
...More often, I think, a reader would side with Faith's 86-year-old father in the most erratically composed, yet most delightful story in this collection, "A Conversation with My Father...
...Trotting along the boardwalk in Brighton Beach and then to her old neighborhood, pridefully noting her fine running form...
...Hegel-Shtein, the absorption of the women in their balls of wool for knitting socks, the isolation of the father in this new matriarchy?and the nebulous emergence of Faith's grief for the husband who has mysteriously wandered away...
...In "Wants," a wife and her ex-husband meet on the steps of the public library...
...You too...
...hinted-at aspects of private life that Mrs...
...She is, first of all, generous in her estimate of everyone, beginning with her autobiographical heroine, who cherishes a clear and favorable image of herself...
...Who that...
...Parents appear carrying antinapalm posters...
...Faith reminisces about a teacher who worked for school integration...
...The difference is that in personal relations we can understand impulses, gestures and near-experiences...
...Though there is surely a need for politics to be brought more frequently into fiction, it can only be done plausibly by those writers who have been actively immersed in it or who have devoted time to serious political thought, rather than to political sympathy...
...Paley is so effective a writer...
...Paley pays eloquent tribute to this involuntary but dedicated community on the stoops and in the gritty playgrounds of New York...
...he exclaims...
...She takes him home to bed with her, and in gratitude he besieges her with poems, folk-rock songs and a brief essay prophesying that a brave younger generation will usher in the "enormous changes" of the title...
...She lives in the city as if it were an amenable farmyard where she gathers what she needs for sustenance: snappy comebacks, wisecracks and rough intimacy????the fruits of urbanity...
...Wants," embodying a world of marital unhappiness in a grain of discord, is an example of Mrs...
...You'll always want nothing...
...Who you...
...I'm doing well this year, and can look forward to better...
...They acknowledge that men are magnetic, transient, slippery, and that women's lives are destined to be shot through with a chronic Sehnsucht for some ideal man who is not there...
...Paley also has the knack, so prominent in her first story collection, The Little Disturbances of Man, of romanticizing even the weakness and unreliability of men...
...She can say, with one of her heroines, "I am better known for my hospitable remarks...
...Though Mrs...
...Readers who take to Mrs...
...She meets insults with amity, observing that a young man who calls her a "blubrous devil" has the intelligent look City College boys used to have when she was 18...
...The heroine of her oheer-ful, modestly bawdy stories about mothers and sons (and occasional husbands) in Greenwich Village is usually called Faith, implying a characterological affinity to the author...
...What makes it so good is the steady counterpoint between the vivid detail of her objective observations????of the features and manner of the domineering Mrs...
...Paley does not like to study sorrow...
...You left everything out...
...Faith responds by furnishing a traditional plot, but all in one paragraph...
...I would like you to write a simple story just once more," he tells his daughter, "the kind de Maupassant wrote or Chekhov wrote...
...Frequently this creates a wonderful effect, quick, muscular and full of feeling...
...Luddy and her babies, and is waking up early every morning to make coffee and help with the bottles...
...she parries sneers with benign facts, divulging to her resistant audience the apartment where her best friend Joanna Rosen used to live, and sharing with them an imposing list of wild flowers she knows: "in yellows alone: common cinquefoil, trout lily, yellow adder's tongue, swamp buttercup...
...In "Faith in a Tree," she lounges with coworkers in the mother trade: Kitty, "rumpled in a black cotton shirt made of shroud remnants at about 14 cents a yard...
...and others who drop anchor to kibitz or argue...
...Mrs...
...Faith is suddenly surrounded by blacks...
...Some stories are three pages long and some 25, but they all telescope events, leaving out the sequence of birth, courtship, marriage????the whole network of human relations ????And giving us only the gist...
...Tragedy...
...It is precisely in the tangential...
...Paley admires, but unfortunately, because she appraises him entirely at his own value, to the utter mystification of the reader...
...and such gratuitous phrases pop up as "simple socialist sense," "fellow independent thinker of the Western bloc," and "my bourgeois time and lumpen feelings...
...Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them...
...Gabby and gregarious, she keeps a beneficent eye on her neighbors' children, swings on a sycamore tree, treats nine-year-olds as if they were her peers, and in general behaves like a dream walking out of Jane Jacobs' or Paul Goodman's miniature metropolis...
...It takes stamina and lung power to be communal in the city, without a forsythia bush or a cellar door of one's own to retreat to, and Mrs...
...Anna Kraut, "close by on a hard park bench, gloomy, beautiful, waiting for her luck to change...
...She is always a bit circuitous, if determined, when she describes sex, and even more reserved (uniquely, for a woman writer) when she is conveying heartbreak...
...If at times her general beneficence extends so warmly to herself that she become a pushover for her own charm, what could be more therapeutic in this age of self-deprecation...
Vol. 57 • June 1974 • No. 13
