Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Archive for ‘August, 2007’

short fiction – Grace Paley

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Grace Paley, a tremendously talented writer of short fiction, passed away last week and I thought it would be appropriate to look at her for this week’s short fiction focus. I was initially introduced to Paley in one of my very first graduate school courses and I remember being astounded to discover that the things a writer leaves out of a story might be just as important as the carefully included words and descriptions. Paley often seems to work her stories around this great looming heap of unspoken emotion and thought. For the most part, her stories center on a very specific moment of the day but yet they manage somehow to lay open the very essence of a character’s entire life. She writes about women and the men they are in relationship with, the children they have brought into the world and the complicated alliance they hold with their inner selves. 

In the introduction to The Collected Stories (published in 1994), Paley addresses one of my own concerns about the perceived distinction between men and women’s literature:  

As a former boy myself (in the sense that many little girls reading Tom Sawyer know they’ve found their true boy selves) I had been sold pretty early on the idea that I might not be writing the important serious stuff. As a grown-up woman I had no choice. Every day life, kitchen life, children life had been handed to me, my portion, the beginning of big luck, though I didn’t know it. 

I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the women’s movement. I didn’t know my small-drop presence or usefulness in this accumulation. Others like Ruth Hershberger, who wrote Adam’s Rib in 1948, and Tillie Olsen, who was writing her stories through the forties and fifties, had more consciousness than I and suffered more. This great wave would crest half a generation later, leaving men sputtering and anxious, but somewhat improved for the crashing bath.

Every woman writing in these years has had to swim in that feminist wave. No matter what she thinks of it, even if she bravely swims against it, she has been supported by it – the buoyancy, the noise, the saltiness. 

It would be difficult for me to select a single Paley story as a favorite. I read many of them over and over and I especially enjoy the set of stories that center around a particular character named Faith. In general, I simply love looking at how she manages to begin a sentence or a paragraph one way and then suddenly hustle the reader off an emotional ridge we didn’t even know we were standing on. She does this again and again, in all of her stories.  

Here’s just one example, from Living (1974): 

After we talked, I felt worse. I left the kids alone and ran down to the corner for a quick sip among living creatures. But Julie’s and all the other bars were full of men and women gulping a hot whiskey before hustling off to make love. People require strengthening before the acts of life. 

Paley uses the bedroom, the kitchen or the front garden as places where life really happens. Her characters are precariously situated and unloved, angry and unsure and she animates them with all the love and care they deserve, making them hers and through her skill and affection, ours as well.    

Don Delillo – Falling Man

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Delillo’s most recent and ominously titled novel tackles the aftermath of September 11th by giving us the story of two New Yorkers – Keith and Lianne. We meet Keith on the horrifying day itself as he slogs, dazed and stunned and holding someone else’s briefcase, away from the rubble and toward Lianne, his almost ex-wife, whom we are told he has been separated from for over a year. Lianne, who we learn later had watched the towers fall believing Keith was inside, believing he was dead, lets him in and slowly these two bewildered individuals find themselves a family again.  

Bewildered, stunned, shocked, numb…these are the predominant flavors of Delillo’s exquisitely-written feast. Both Lianne and Keith seem to move through a foggy haze. There are moments that they lose control, like when Lianne finds herself attacking a neighbor woman for playing music too loud in their building, but that stronger emotion is swallowed up by the whale of her own shock. And again for Keith, who gets in a fight in a department store, he seems to experience this loss of control as a curious and misplaced moment in his day, a fluke. Although this myriad of astonishment and numbness seems to ring true, psychologically speaking, following this kind of traumatic event, it did create a wall between me as the reader and the novel’s characters. Neither Lianne nor Keith, despite the carefulness of Delillo’s description and the thoughtfully attended subject matter, managed to create a ripple on my reservoir of sympathy. Their stunned bearing kept them watching their own lives from a distance and therefore, held me behind the same restraining wall.  

On the day the novel opens, the twin towers are no longer a part of the New York City skyline but their ghost looms over the entire novel with a lurking shadow and Delillo parallels this metaphorical reality in several places: Lianne’s father’s years-before suicide, the children hunting the skies for planes and believing that the already fallen towers will fall again, and even the sporadic attention paid to Keith’s missing friends. It’s extremely well-done, this idea that something missing can take up more space in its absence and just one example of the many questions that Delillo poses in Falling Man.  

Despite the more personal nature of this novel, Delillo is still exceptionally good at turning a microscopic lens on America in a general sense, at its nuances, its eccentricities and emotions and Falling Man is no exception. His characters may remain enmeshed inside their own personal story but they externalize more global fears and opinions: 

But that’s why you built the towers, isn’t it? Weren’t the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You build a thing like that so you can see it come down. The provocation is obvious. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice? It’s a fantasy, so why not do it twice? You are saying, Here it is, bring it down. 

There is quite a lot packed inside this novel, a lot of questions and a lot of ideas in only 246 pages. In one sense it presents just one single road inside September 11th, only one example of an individual’s reaction to the trauma and damage of that day. But at the same time, Keith and Lianne’s couple offers the dual perspectives of survivor and spectator and Delillo works these distinctions very well.

Among other literary explorations of America’s response to September 11th as a defining moment, Falling Man stands out as careful and specific, as honest but still kind, and most of all, as an attentive work of art.