Little Disturbances of Woman Later the Same Day

To residents of Greenwich Village, Grace Paley is the friendly neighborhood radical. Every sunny Saturday afternoon this year the diminutive grandmother has been on duty at the busy intersection of Sixth Avenue and Eleventh Street, buttonholing passersby on behalf of the Women's Pentagon Action. "Would you like to sign a petition against U.S. military intervention in Central America?" she asks. For the 37 years she has lived in the Village, Paley, 62, has engaged in countless curbside solicitations as well as rallies, demonstrations and sit-ins. Her causes have been as local as keeping traffic out of Washington Square Park and as global as U.S. nuclear policy.

But outside the Village, Paley has an entirely different reputation. Her first book of short stories, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), was lavishly praised by critics and by colleagues as disparate as Philip Roth, Donald Barthelme and Susan Sontag--but not for the book's political messages. In fact, the tales were devoid of exhortation. Their main concern was human --mostly female--suffering. Her second book, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), also evoked the anguish of women caught in what she called "the courts of kitchen drama." Wives were abandoned, mothers were overburdened by cherished babies, and grown children grieved for their parents fading away in institutions for the elderly.

In her third volume, Later the Same Day, the heroines have aged a few years. But the familial tragedies are much the same, and they are still leavened by the author's lively erotic imagination and her invincible ironies. Although Paley continues to skirt the political confrontations she elicits in life, her writing ministers to the walking wounded from the '60s. In "Friends," three women gather at the bedside of a dying companion. All have yet another cause for sorrow: a daughter found dead in a faraway rooming house. A boy vanished into California: "a son, a boy of fifteen, who disappears before your very eyes into a darkness or a light behind his own, from which neither hugging nor hitting can bring him."

Some of the fierce vitality of the sexual encounters in Paley's earlier stories have given way to more nostalgic couplings. In "Listening," a middle-aged woman driving south on Broadway sees a pedestrian whose "nice unimportant clothes seemed to be merely a shelter for the naked male person." She thinks, "Oh, man, in the very center of your life, still fitting your skin so nicely . . . why have you slipped out of my sentimental and carnal grasp?" Turning to a woman friend in the car, she says: "He's nice, isn't he?" The reply is vintage Paley: "I suppose so . . . but what is he, just a bourgeois on his way home."