Chantal's Reviews > The Little Disturbances of Man

Earlier this month I came across Grace Paley’s The Little Disturbances of Man on the clearance rack at Half Price Books. At two bucks, I knew this was a book to buy—I’d heard Paley’s name mentioned perhaps a dozen times in and around the Bennington campus—but that was all I knew of Paley. I began reading The Little Disturbances of Man oblivious to anything and everything about the author or her work.
Upon opening the book, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was a short story collection I was to embark on. Then, I was quite impressed with the first line of the opening story, “Goodbye and Good Luck”: “I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rose.”
Half way through the first paragraph—“Only a person like your mama stands on one foot, she don’t notice how big her behind is getting and sings in the canary’s ear for thirty years. Who’s listening?”—I realized I was in the company of some very special literature. In less than seven lines, Paley had declared herself, her work, deserving of my full attention and respect. I wanted to immerse myself into these stories, assuming they would live up to my sudden and grand expectations.
They did. Cozied up in my favorite wingback, sipping at hot tea with milk, in the quietest room of our home, I devoured The Little Disturbances of Man.
The experience was, for me, like answering the door to a big box of long stem roses in March, when my birthday has long since past and my anniversary is still months away. Like ordering spaghetti bolognaise to discover the most delicious flavors tucked in that most common dish.
Paley’s talent for prose and her gift with language—evidenced, so markedly, in a small print, I didn’t initially observe, on the book’s cover, “Stories of Women and Men at Love”—were what first had me rubbing my palms together. Then, it was her genius with dialogue, so natural, so pointedly accurate, so shrewd, that had me grinning. But it was Paley’s characters that had me smitten: the delicious Aunt Rose; the cunning child temptress, Josephine; the so-likeable and so-tragic Freddy; the sad, strong, complicated, beautiful, abandoned Virginia; the wise and comical Charles C. Charley and his savvy, silly Cindy. Her clever, pleasantly understated plots and her instinct for poking at the obscurities, the intricacies, innate to the relationships of men and women—that was, for me, the sweet cream-cheese frosting on Paley’s cake.
Reading Paley’s The Little Disturbances of Man was, for me, a most delectable experience.