The Little Disturbances of Man

Resumen del libro

"The Little Disturbances of Man" brings together ten of her short stories. While they may not, to be sure, fully satisfy confirmed plot-watchers, they are marked throughout by a well-defined and artfully guileless form of narrative progression. But the heart of the matter in these tales is their serio- comic stance: character revealed through the wry devices that man contrives, consciously and unconsciously, to shore up his uncertain existence and, sometimes, to salvage laughter from lamentation. In "The Loudest Voice," the Paley approach is glimpsed in the reaction of a Jewish immigrant to his wife's horrified announcement that their child is to be in a Christmas--a Christian play. "You're in America," the husband retorts. "In Palestine the Arabs would be eating you alive. Europe you had pogroms. Argentina is full of Indians. Here you got Christmas." Or in the lyrically visible opening of "The Contest"--"Up early or late, it never matters, the day gets away from me. summer or winter, the shade of trees or their hard shadow, I never get into my Rice Krispies till noon." The people in these tales exist on the far periphery of the Important world; and the themes are as the title states: the little disturbances of man--"little" vis-a-vis cosmic catastrophes, but major to the personal business of daily living. A "bachelor girl" recollects an amorous past on the eve of her marriage to a long-ago beau; a determined teenager cons a bemused young soldier into an entangling alliance; a husband-abandoned wife and mother wait out the idolized prodigal's return imperturbably confident; a girl's long, frustrated need for love is examined from her own viewpoint--and from the viewpoint of a man. These are characters who move through the oblique human comedy of Mrs. Paley's stories. Small-time people, in terms of the world worldly, they none the less reflect the perdurable instinct of most people everywhere to improvise ways and means of accepting the indifferent universe.