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Little Disturbances of Man, by Grace Paley |
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 GRACE
PALEY was born
to Russian immigrant parents in 1922 in the Bronx, New
York. She grew up in a neighborhood "so dense with
Jews I thought we were the great imposing majority."
Countless stories told by her father and aunts colored
her childhood and provided material for her later writing.
She grew up hearing Russian, Yiddish, and English-no
doubt contributing to her unique voice. Paley briefly
attended Hunter College, married at the age of nineteen,
and had two children. She soon separated from her husband.
Writing only poetry into her thirties, Paley published
her first book of stories, The Little Disturbances of
Man, in 1959, which was followed by two highly regarded
collections, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974)
and Later the Same Day (1985). Her political causes
manifest themselves in her stories, though they are
merely one aspect of the richly detailed lives of her
characters. Long an antiwar activist and feminist, Paley
was one of the founders of the Greenwich Village Peace
Center, in 1961; she considers herself a "somewhat
combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist."
Paley's other books include The Collected Stories (1994);
Just As I Thought (1998), and Begin Again: Collected
Poems (2000). She has received awards and grants from
the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for
the Arts, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
She has taught at Columbia and Syracuse Universities,
and currently teaches at both Sarah Lawrence College
and the City College of New York, where she is writer-in-residence.
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In
THE LITTLE DISTURBANCES OF MAN, relationships
between women and men are turbulent, mysterious, and
frequently surprising. Grace Paley shows us couples
who divorce but remain as intimate with each other
as when married. She probes the affairs younger women
avidly pursue with older men. She gives us a perennial
mistress who eventually marries the man she's been
having a thirty-year affair with. Paley makes no judgments
about her characters; she simply invites us to observe
them. With wry, sly humor and keen insight into the
way we really live-as opposed to how we like to think
we live-Paley's stories provoke rarely asked, potentially
inflammatory questions about relationships. Why do
men and women get married and have children when the
result is a crowded house, a grouchy husband, and
an overworked, desperate wife? Is adultery really
so bad? Why is it both commonplace and universally
condemned? Is it wrong for older men to have consensual
sexual relationships with willing young women?
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Reading
Group Discussion Guide:
1.
In "Goodbye and Good Luck," why does Rose choose
an independent life rather than marriage and children?
2. Why does Rose end her affair with Vlashkin after meeting
his wife? Why does she so readily resume the affair?
3. In "A Woman, Young and Old," why does Josephine
want to marry Browny?
4. Why does Anna see Peter as "The Pale Pink Roast"?
5. After Anna cheats on her new husband with him, why is
Peter happy when Anna says "I did it for love"—even
though he has just rebuked her for making a donkey out of
himself and her new husband (p. 51)?
6. Why does Shirley characterize the Christians as "lonesome"
in "The Loudest Voice" (p. 63)?
7. In "The Contest," why does Dotty pursue a man
like Freddy?
8. What does Freddy mean when he says that "the pure
unmentionable fact is that women isolate you" (p. 76)?
9. Why does John Raftery declare in "An Interest in
Life" that Virginia's "list of troubles"
isn't real suffering—it adds up only to "the little
disturbances of man" (p. 99)?
10. Why would the Grahams, in "An Irrevocable Diameter,"
prefer having Charles C. Charley as a son-in-law, instead
of letting Cindy damage her reputation?
11. Why does Charles predict that Cindy "will be a
marvelous woman in six or seven years. I wish her luck;
by then we will be strangers" (p. 123)?
12. In "The Used-Boy Raisers," why are the paths
taken by her ex-husband (Livid) and current husband (Pallid)
not Faith's concern (p. 134)?
13. Why does Clifford call Faith "the accumulator"
in "A Subject of Childhood" (p. 138)?
14. In "In Time Which Made a Monkey of Us All,"
why does Eddie's heart sink when the "War Attenuator"
works (p. 160)?
15. What does the narrator of "The Floating Truth"
mean when she says that "the shortest distance between
two points is a great circle" (p. 178)?
For Further Reflection:
1. Can marriage between women and men satisfy their desires
equally?
2. What do you make of Faith's comment in "The Used-Boy
Raisers" that "Jews have one hope only,"
which is to be "a splinter in the toe of civilizations,
a victim to aggravate the conscience" (p. 132)?
3. Why are "noisy signs of life...so much trouble to
a man," as Virginia states in "An Interest in
Life" (p. 100)?
Other
Titles by Grace Paley:
After Sorrow, 1996
Begin Again, 2001
The Collected Stories, 1994
Later the Same Day, 1986
New and Collected Poems
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, 1985
Just as I Thought, 1999
Night in the Garden of Brooklyn: The Collected Stories of
Harvey Swados, 2004
My View is Incomplete: Selected Writings, 2001
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