In the following excerpt, DeKoven examines the reconciliation of postmodern form with traditional subjects in Paley 's works, particularly in "A Conversation with My Father" and "Faith in the Afternoon."

... Though Paley has published only two collections of stories, The Little Disturbances of Man and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, she is nonetheless an important writer—important in the significance of the fictional possibilities she realizes rather than in the uniform merit of her published work. She is not always at her best. But when she is, Paley reconciles the demands of avant-garde or postmodern form for structural openness and the primacy of the surface with the seemingly incompatible demands of traditional realist matenal for orchestrated meaning and cathartic emotion.

"A Conversation with My Father," in Enormous Changes, makes of this seeming incompatibility an argument between father and daughter, from which emerges the statement, crucial to...