August 23, 2007, 5:20pm
Goodbye, Grace
By Gabriel Sanders
Writer Grace Paley died yesterday. A New York Times obit says that, “In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind.” Paley was 84.
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What a wonderful writer she was! Sharp, acerbic, to the point, perfectly capturing a specific place and time in New York (a New York both Jewish and gentile, a New York that cut across classes). "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute" is a brilliant short story collection. The Times has it right; the literary world needs more strong Jewish American female voices like Grace Paley's.
"Writer Grace Paley died yesterday. A New York Times obit says that, “In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind.” Paley was 84." If she will be remembered at all, and it's too early to say that she will, it won't be because she wrote about "women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind.” If this is the best one can say about her work, then I doubt she will survive.
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