Art and Experience

The substance of the conversation between the daughter and her father concerns the way real life should be represented in fiction. The major conflict between the two resides in their different experiences of life and, therefore, different expectations for fiction. The father wishes his daughter would write stories like those of Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekhov, nineteenth-century European writers whose works reflect more structured societies and whose characters struggle within those societies' limited opportunities. The father, as Paley explains in a note accompanying Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, represents her real father, a Russian who immigrated to the United States at the age of twenty. His experience leads him to desire and appropriate stories about the tragic events of "recognizable people." In an interview with Joan Lidoff published in Shenandoah, Paley states that her father "came from a world where there was no choice...