Book Report
THERE'S a parlor game that literary folk sometimes play: How many of the abundance of titles being produced by contemporary writers, they speculate, will be remembered 50 years from now?</br></br>John Updike, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Gore Vidal, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth - if history is any guide, most of their words will fall away. Among the prolific Victorians, the only one with an ample number of works readily available is Dickens. But of the 17 volumes in one standard edition of Thackeray, who cares about any other than Vanity Fair? George Gissing wrote at least two dozen books, but only New Grub Street has really lasted.</br></br>Quantity, then, is no key to survival. Which brings us to Grace Paley, who seems as likely to survive as any of the big guys but who, comparatively, has published almost nothing at all.</br></br>You could take The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985), her three books of fiction, combine them into one omnibus volume, and it would still be shorter than your average Vidal or Mailer novel. Yet while most books from 1985 - to say nothing of '74 or '59 - are already forgotten, Paley's remain in print.</br></br>"I am ambitious, but it's a long-range thing with me," says the narrator in an early story, "The Promise." "I have my confidential sights on a star, but there's half a lifetime to get to it. Meanwhile I keep my eyes open and am well dressed."