[In the following review, Baxter offers a positive evaluation of The Collected Stories.]

Grace Paley’s stories have achieved something of a cult or classic status, and with good reason. Since their first appearance in book form in 1959 with The Little Disturbances of Man, they have been notable for their humor and urban grit, their quick-witted sadness, and for their voices. No one else’s stories sound like these. The stories don’t seem literary so much as colloquial socialist-democratic, spoken aloud on a street corner or a front stoop, to witnesses.

This book [The Collected Stories] brings together all 45 of them, from the first collection through the second, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, to the most recent, Later the Same Day, published in 1985. They are here without any appreciable changes, revision, or additions, except for a three-page preface by the author. It’s exhilarating and depressing to read them, depressing only because there aren’t a few more of them from the past few years. It’s as if they’re about a quality in American communal life that isn’t quite so visible anymore: the joy of telling a story, as opposed to the pleasure of confessing to error in oneself or finding blame in others, the triumph of the Puritan-therapeutic.

From the beginning, Paley’s stories have had a distinctive sound and subject. The sound is declarative, often high in volume but without vehemence or bluster. In the oblique connection between sentences, poetry seeps in. No speaker sounds just like any other. But often a love of Jewish-American cadences and storytelling style is audible. Samples won’t do. But here is one: “This is a great ballswinger of a city on the constant cement-mixing remake, battering and shattering, and a high note out of a wild clarinet could be the decibel to break a citizen’s eardrum.”

She has been one of our great listeners. Her African Americans (in “The Little Girl”) don’t sound like her Hispanics (in “Gloomy Tune”). Among her recurring characters, the nosy and gossipy Mrs. Raftery doesn’t sound like Mrs. Hegel-Shtein, the scourge of the Children of Judea Retirement Home, with her sinister, carefully oiled silent wheelchair, the better to intrude on visiting children and their parents. And Faith, the aptly named protagonist and narrator of many of the stories, sounds always like herself, a brainy non-linear political activist, a mother, lover, and citizen of a city.

The stories are tough and delicate, like spun steel. Most of them are about the refusal of victimization in the organization of collective political life and in the possibility of constant change. Their introspections are brief and lyrical. Being social, they are impatient with solemnity and inwardness, particularly of the masculine variety. In the very best stories—the great stories—all this collective optimism does its best to come to grips with trauma, personal and historic.

In “The Immigrant Story,” Jack, a child of immigrant parents traumatized by European history, tries and finally succeeds in breaking through the narrator’s relentless American optimism. The ending of this story is hushed and shockingly beautiful, a portrait of survivors living on in America where their terror is hardly understood. In “Conversation with My Father,” the narrator’s dying father tries to convince her of the importance of background, the force of habit, the force of death. His daughter, the narrator, tries to humor him, but he sees through her. “Tragedy!” he says. “You too! When will you look it in the face?”

He has the last word. The stories recognize tragedy but struggle against it. Patterns, they say, can be broken. Zagrowsky, the ex-racist in “Zagrowsky Tells,” narrates his account of his adoption of a black grandchild and his personal, as opposed to ideological, change of heart. This story, like some of the others in Later the Same Day, has a slightly didactic feel, as if the anxiety one feels about the way things are turning out demands perpetual vigilance and some teaching. “Anxiety” includes a lecture to young fathers. People are always telling other people off in these stories—Faith gets told off in “Listening” for not paying attention to lesbians—for their own good. Everyone has an opinion. Voices are raised to entertain and instruct.

All these stories shift subjects rapidly, as colloquial storytellers do: they require a nimble mind to keep up with them. There’s a sort of old socialist feminist hipster quality to them, a style of self-interruption and wild interconnections. Paley has never had much use for the dogged and dutiful linear story of gruesome solitudes and subjectivities. This is not the country of Sherwood Anderson.

Paley’s stories are exemplars of radical democratic art, the fiction of argumentation, humor, and tale-telling in the public square. They urge us to break our patterns, to find enormous changes in the mixing of private and public life. They speak against compulsive repetition and its dulling of the spirit. The city they occupy is one where people still talk to each other. There is still a public life in these stories, of public women and men with articulated social ideals. The front stoop has not yet given way to the triple-locked furnished room, where obscure private events hold sway. It is heartening to think that the city these stories evoke may still exist.

There were virtually no models for her kind of story when Paley began writing. And it is possible that younger readers obsessed with wounds and privacy and therapy addiction may find these stories hard going. (My adult students have always caught on to them more quickly than my younger ones.) But one can take away a feeling for courage even from the horrific tales, like “The Little Girl.” One could wish for more stories, but Paley’s resistance to the American mania for productivity is itself admirable.

Humorous, sharp, and sly, The Collected Stories is that rare thing, a great collection of American fiction. Now those of us who love Grace Paley’s stories can replace our broken and taped paperbacks of her books, with their pages yellowing and falling out, with a book that will hold together and stand the test of time.