I was late to the Paley party and went there with precisely the wrong attitude—determined to like her work because all the right people seemed to. In spite of this impulse or perhaps because of it, I struggled at first. I think she is a slippery customer. She has been dubbed a “writer of voice” and I think that’s right. At first I heard only the voice—I couldn’t make out anything it was saying.
‘Wants’ is the story that made Paley click, for me. A woman bumps into her ex-husband on the steps of a library, on her way to return two Edith Wharton books which are 18 years overdue. He follows her to the Returns Desk to talk about the end of their marriage, the reasons for it. His tone is somewhat accusatory, and his diagnosis is tethered to specifics. The narrator’s responses are not so easy to pin down. When he laments (if that’s the right word) that she has never wanted anything (he has always wanted a motorboat, for example) it cuts her to the quick, and when he has gone she reflects on what she does want—a list not of objects but of better ways to live.
There’s a pregnancy to everything in the story—each detail and aspect might be symbolic of some other detail or aspect, but never in a simplistic way. For example, I’ve seen analyses of it that have the husband a symbol of phallocentrism, but I can’t believe it of Paley, whose work I have since been able to greatly enjoy, that she would have set out with so trite a goal. These reductive analyses disregard the kindness, the regard, shown him by the narrator—and this kindness imbues all of Paley’s work: a tolerance for people’s shortcomings and mistakes and for the shortfalls of reality versus expectations.
Her stories do not reach simple conclusions. There is no rush to judgement. The most powerful voices, for me, have been either those with a similar perspective to mine that nevertheless help me see other perspectives, or those with a different perspective to mine that nevertheless help me feel seen. Paley is the latter.
First collected in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974. Now available in The Collected Stories, Virago Modern Classics
A Personal Anthology 