Name: Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
Rating: 4.5 (2 reviews)
ISBN: 9781439512890

Grace Paley

Seventeen stories written over the past fifteen years reveal the author's vision of human love and tragedy

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

Jack asked me, Isn't it a terrible thing to grow up in the shadow of another person's sorrow?

I suppose so, I answered. As you know, I grew up in the summer sunlight of upward mobility. This leached out a lot of that dark ancestral grief.

He went on with his life. It's not your fault if that's the case. Your bad disposition is not your fault. Yet you're always angry. No way out but continuous rage or the nut-house.

What if this sorrow is all due to history? I asked.

mrs. paley, i owe you an apology... i was not in fact familiar with your game. thank you for living such a metal life and still finding time to write a treasure trove of deceptively simple stories in prose so fluid i might be tempted to go for the cliché and compare it to water.

as with any short story collection, some are better than others, but if anything was going to convert me from my rocky history with anthologies and remind me redemption is possible, i’m not surprised it’s this one. “a conversation with my father” alone is to 

what “uncle wiggily in connecticut” was to 

something about these blue hour stories, so much like little hopper paintings.

the datedness of an author’s style & subject tends to alienate a work from a literary audience no longer in touch with a bygone demographic, but paley strikes a so-specific-it-became-the-opposite approach to what are essentially different études around the same archetype & way of life. she disappeared completely into the writing and i along with her. so, so yum. i need to go back and reread some of these with a better brain for taking them apart.

Jack asked me, Isn't it a terrible thing to grow up in the shadow of another person's sorrow?

I suppose so, I answered. As you know, I grew up in the summer sunlight of upward mobility. This leached out a lot of that dark ancestral grief.

He went on with his life. It's not your fault if that's the case. Your bad disposition is not your fault. Yet you're always angry. No way out but continuous rage or the nut-house.

What if this sorrow is all due to history? I asked.

mrs. paley, i owe you an apology... i was not in fact familiar with your game. thank you for living such a metal life and still finding time to write a treasure trove of deceptively simple stories in prose so fluid i might be tempted to go for the cliché and compare it to water.

as with any short story collection, some are better than others, but if anything was going to convert me from my rocky history with anthologies and remind me redemption is possible, i’m not surprised it’s this one. “a conversation with my father” alone is to enormous changes what “uncle wiggily in connecticut” was to nine stories—something about these blue hour stories, so much like little hopper paintings.

the datedness of an author’s style & subject tends to alienate a work from a literary audience no longer in touch with a bygone demographic, but paley strikes a so-specific-it-became-the-opposite approach to what are essentially different études around the same archetype & way of life. she disappeared completely into the writing and i along with her. so, so yum. i need to go back and reread some of these with a better brain for taking them apart.

In this collection of short stories, originally published in 1974, Grace Paley "makes the novel as a form seem virtually redundant" (Angela Carter, "London Review of Books"). Her stories here capture "the itch of the city, love between parents and children" and "the cutting edge of combat" (Lis Harris, "The New York Times Book Review"). In this collection of seventeen stories, she creates a "solid and vital fictional world, cross-referenced and dense with life" (Walter Clemons, "Newsweek").

Stories

Trever

After re-reading these stories when I went through her Collected Stories, I've come around on this and Paley's become one of my favorite short-story writers. See my review of the Collected Stories


ORIGINAL: 3 Stars

This was so much more bleak than I expected it to be. I knew it was postmodern, but some of these stories (eg. "The Little Girl", "Samuel") were just depressing. A few of them (eg. "Distance", "Come On, Ye Sons of Art") were just uninteresting. "The Burdened Man" was great and the title story was meh. I think Paley was an important writer for her time for sure, although a lot of the stories seem dated forty years later. I probably would read more from her, but not anytime soon.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

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