594 The American Century: Literature since 1945Carroll. Childwold (1976) is a lyrical portrait of the artist as a young woman. Unholy
Loves (1979), Solstice (1985), and Maya: A Life (1986) cast a cold eye on the American
professional classes. You Must Remember This (1987) commemorates the con-
spiratorial obsessions of the 1950s; Because it is Bitter, and Because it is My Heart
(1991) dramatizes the explosive nature of American race relations; Blonde (2000) is
an imaginative rewriting of the life of the movie icon Marilyn Monroe; while
My Sister, My Love (2008) reimagines an actual murder case, focusing on how
ambitious parents alternately push and ignore their unhappy children.. Her fiction
is richly various in form and focus; common to most of it, however, including recent
works like Missing Mom (2005) and The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007), is a
preoccupation with crisis. She shows people at risk: apparently ordinary characters
whose lives are vulnerable to threats from society or their inner selves or, more likely,
both. In Oates’s much anthologized short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have
You Been?” (1970), for instance, the central character, Connie, is an all-American
girl, fatally at ease with the blandness of her adolescent life. She becomes the
helpless victim of a caller, realistically presented yet somehow demonic, whom she
mistakes for a friend. Her sense of security, it is intimated, is a dangerous illusion.
The stories and novels of Oates are full of such characters. Some, like Connie, find
violence erupting from their surroundings; others, frustrated by the barren or
grotesque nature of their lives and social circumstances, erupt into violence
themselves. With all of them, there is the sense that they are the victims of forces
beyond their control or comprehension. Whatever many of them may believe to the
contrary, they are dwellers in a dark and destructive element.
Violence also threatens the lives of the characters in the stories of Grace Paley
(1922–2007). In this case, however, the characters seem to find the energy to resist,
or at least survive. In tale after tale in her several collections (The Little Disturbances
of Man (1959), Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), Later the Same Day
(1985)), the reader is presented with irrepressibly energetic children, feisty women,
and tough-minded men. Supposedly ordinary working-class people, mostly
inhabiting the cheaper, rougher districts of New York City, they show an extraordinary
capacity to weather economic deprivation, social oppression, or familial violence.
And Paley explores their irrepressible hunger for life, their courage in the face of
aging and loss – and, not least, their willingness to take risks to encourage change
within their lifetimes – in a prose that is equally extraordinary. At once quirky and
lyrical, ironic and poetic, her style becomes a measure of how far from average
“average” people are: as each one of them confronts “the expensive moment” when,
driven “by conscience or passion or even only love of one’s own agemates,” they try
to make their lives count. Nothing, perhaps, could be further from this than
the fiction of Alison Lurie (1926–) and Anne Tyler (1941–). In novels like Love and
Friendship (1962), The War Between the Tates (1974), Foreign Affairs (1984),
and Consequences (2006), Lurie has marked with quiet satire the lives of academics
and authors: the politics of the family and the campus, the contacts and conflicts
between American and English society. Tyler has ranged more widely, in such
novels as Earthly Possessions (1977), Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982),GGray_c05.indd 594ray_c 05 .indd 594 8 8/1/2011 7:31:33 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 33 PM