I bought this because I was quite intrigued by her interview in an old issue of the Paris Review.
It’s very… it’s very 50s? Think Streetcar Named Desire but New York instead. And more geared toward being printed in magazines, so you get more humour and stuff (lots of jokes), but it’s still that Serious Picaresque Drama that seemed to be hegemonic for a minute.
And the text is very worked through — it feels like it’s been tweaked a lot so that every single sentence is a work of genius *crosses fingers*. This writing style gets to be really annoying if there’s not a lot to back it up, and I feel there really isn’t here. Some of the tableaux aren’t that far from Thomas Pynchon, really, but…
The Little Disturbances of Man (1959) by Grace Paley (buy new, buy used, 3.94 on Goodreads)