The Syntax of Surprise

THE LITTLE DISTURBANCES OF MAN by Grace Paley. 189 pages. Viking. $4.50.

In this fast and fickle culture, British Critic Cyril Connolly once declared, it is ambition enough for any author to set out to write a book that will last ten years. "And of how many books," he asked, "is that true today?" One notable example is this artful, bracing group of stories, Grace Paley's first and, so far, only book. Little noticed when it was published in 1959, it has since won enough readers and impressed enough critics to justify a new edition even before its first decade is up.

The source of the book's vitality is its language--supple and colloquial, yet framed in the syntax of surprise. The syncopated speech patterns constantly shift away from familiar formulations. In An Interest in Life, a deserted mother observes: a woman "gets fatter, she gets older, she could lie down, nuzzling a regiment of men and little kids, or she could just die of the pleasure. But men are different, they have to own money, men must do well in the world. I know that men are not fooled by being happy."

This language is the medium through which Grace Paley builds personality. It provides a salty, descriptive surface for otherwise callow characters such as the novice nymphet in bed with a soldier in A Woman, Young and Old, or the gay but rusting blade of The Contest who thinks he can do without marriage. For the book's best and most typical characters--spunky, passionate women, abandoned by men and saddled with children and poverty--life is a form of coping with the mysteries of love and loneliness.

No catastrophes befall these people. Their trials are in what one character calls the "courts of kitchen drama," where sadness and hilarity contend in a constant, shaky equilibrium. The teenage scientist of In Time Which Made a Monkey of Us All prankishly pipes non-toxic gas into neighborhood apartments, only to kill off all the animals in his father's pet shop. Still, such trials can end with severe sentences. The deserted mother's vision of her husband's eventual return is affecting because it seems so hopeless. The teenager, unable to face the consequences of his experiment, goes mad and leaves his father to die of old age and grief.

This acknowledgment that the little disturbances of man are not so little is what saves the book from cleverness--this, and a warm acceptance of life. As one of its hard-pressed women observes when an inventory of all her troubles paradoxically gives her hope: "All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad, or peculiar."

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