Straight Arrow

By Martha Duffy

ENORMOUS CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE

by GRACE PALEY 198 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

$6.95.

In the second of these 17 short stories, a woman writer remarks, "There is a long time in me between knowing and telling." Grace Paley must have taken particular pleasure in zinging that line at her readers. She enjoys little collusive asides, and heaven knows she is a deliberate writer. Her only other book, The Little Disturbances of Man, was also a collection of stories.

Paley's fiction is intensely urban. Most of her stories are about women in domestic circumstances. In Faith in the Afternoon, a harried housewife goes to visit her parents at the Children of Judea home for the aged near Coney Island and learns that the generation gap is measured in inches. In Wants, a woman concludes that her 27-year marriage ended mostly because of her lack of simple, binding covetousness.

Some of these stories are mere wisps--a filament of character, a. frisson of nuance. A few are too fanciful by half. What makes the collection very much worth reading is the author's ardent belief in her characters. Paley finds all her people exceptional, and she describes them with a charge of feeling that is unfailingly seductive.

This kind of a cappella writing is a very chancy business. Paley usually succeeds because she is a poised, naturally gifted writer who trusts her own quirky, ironic imagination. The stories--whether two pages or 20--run their courses as cleanly and surely as arrows flying in air. . Martha Duffy

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