Critical Essay | Critical Review by Susie Linfield

Critical Review by Susie Linfield

SOURCE: “The Challenge of Writing as a Form of Social Activism,” in Los Angeles Times, May 27, 1998, p. E6.

In the following review of Just As I Thought, Linfield commends Paley's remarkable insight, but finds the collection to be of uneven quality.

A critic once compared Grace Paley’s fiction to that of Isaac Babel—one of her heroes—noting that their “taut prose hits you in the face like seltzer.” Indeed, in her short stories and novellas, Paley is a master (mistress?) of the terse phrase that reveals a world of fiercely contradictory emotion. When the young wife in Paley’s 1959 story “An Interest in Life” states simply, “My husband gave me a broom one Christmas. This wasn’t right,” we are instantly invited into the complex world of a stubbornly disappointing marriage.

But this minimalist, suggestive style can easily lose power when used in the nonfiction essay. Many of the pieces...
(read more)