Year Published: 1974
Having been raised by a boomer mother, I can safely say that the events of the "long Sixties" (1958 to 1974) informed just about every aspect of my upbringing. My mom was, as we'd say now, old school: she marched on the Pentagon, wore white lipstick, and broke the glass ceiling in her department at her public university. She bought me The Beatles: 1967-1970 for my eleventh birthday and deconstructed the gendered messages in Cinderella. So the long Sixties is an era that I feel I understand, at least as much as one can who did not live through it.
Yet within that little dependent clause lies my difficulty with Enormous Changes: I did not live through that era, and in much the same way that I need to read an annotated version of Shakespeare because of his period inflections and references, there is so much that Grace Paley writes on that I have no hope of understanding without help. Her work in this book is imbued with a huge sense of time and place -- New York City during the "cultural revolution" -- which certainly is in her favor as far as realism and weight go, but a young reader like me has next to no chance of grasping all her points.
Let me back up a moment and say that Grace Paley is one of the finest writers of the twentieth century. I've read Begin Again, the newest collection of her poetry, and though her style isn't really my thing, I can appreciate her brilliance. Similarly, while reading Enormous Changes, her writing abilities were never once in question. Take this tiny snippet from the story "Faith in a Tree":
Of course that is what Junior is upstate for: love that forced possession. At first his father laced him on his behind, cutting the exquisite design known to generations of daddies who labored at home before the rise of industrialism and group therapy. Then Mr. Finn remembered his childhood, that it was Adam's Fall not Junior that was responsible. Now the Finns never see a ten-speed Italian racer without family sighs for Junior, who is still not home as there were about 176 bikes he loved.
Her prose is sharp and lean and often hilarious or upsetting, or sometimes both at the same time. I can't off the top of my head think of another writer who has managed to squeeze so much into stories that are so short.
A little less than half of the stories contained herein concern Paley's most famous character, Faith Darwin, a woman who is featured in stories throughout Paley's career. I have to say that I enjoyed these stories least of all the stories in the collection. Out of all the stories in Enormous Changes, they rely most on the minutiae of life in the working-class areas of New York City during the long Sixties, and thus were the least accessible to me.
My favorites in the collection include "Wants," the title story, and "A Conversation with My Father," the first and last of which seem very autobiographical. Thinking about it as I write this, what I think I really want from Grace Paley is a memoir, which would give me both her astounding writing and a firm context for it all.
Recommended? If you're over forty, I say yes wholeheartedly. If you're younger, I say yes with some hesitation.
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