Ali Smith reads Grace Paley
Grace Paley's short stories are a kind of life-force in themselves. Often in her writing, the very form of the story will up and challenge you with its wit, its energy and its talkback; for Paley, voice is always about life. In "Conversation with My Father", she distils into a single story the huge and subtle power in dialogue, the joyful belligerence in argument and engagement that's found right through her work.
An old man and his daughter are having what is obviously a run-of-the-mill, long-running disagreement. This time it's about the kinds of story the daughter writes. The old man likes a story to take the shape he knows, the classic shape. This is not the way his daughter writes, and it annoys him. His annoyance, in turn, makes her mischievous. He challenges her to tell him a story right now, one shaped like stories should be shaped, with the right kinds of characters, the right kinds of plot. The daughter tries. What happens – funny, sad, infuriating – is that the force of story won't be corralled any more than life itself will.
Story here is a matter of life and death; the father is old, ill and dying; they both know it, and so does the reader. But this breathtaking, breathgiving short story, which never compromises on this truth or the admittance of inevitable tragedy, is profoundly, comically generous in its open-endedness, and leaves you both shaken and renewed by the heart, the fight and the life in it.
