Joyce Carol Oates

The wedding was like a dream outside her power, or like a show unmanaged by her in which she was to have no part.

How aptly named: Grace Paley. For ‘grace’ is perhaps the most accurate, if somewhat poetic, term to employ in speaking of this gifted writer who has concentrated on short, spare fiction through a career of nearly five decades. First published in 1959 with The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley immediately drew an audience of readers who were not only admiring but loving. Her subsequent collections of stories – Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985) – confirmed her reputation as a lyricist of the domestic life, a poet in prose whose ear for the Jewish-American vernacular suggests a kinship with her older contemporaries, Singer, Malamud and Bellow.’‘

As in one of Escher’s visual paradoxes, where infinity opens up vertiginously within a single geometric figure, object and anti-object define each other, and ‘foreground’ and ‘background’ are made to shift according to one’s perspective, the highly combustible issue of race in America, and its consequences in terms of the academic-literary canon, depend almost entirely on one’s position. The much-publicised ‘culture wars’ and the seriocomic ‘battle of the books’ of the American literary-academic community – the bitter controversies over who will determine the sacred ‘canon’ – are less about putative standards of literature than about what constitutes a ‘worthy’ life.’