When photography arrived in the world, or so I’ve heard, painting had to reconsider itself. “What can I do that photography can’t?” painting asked itself, in its alarmed French accent. “How may I yet be essential?”

The prime quality of literary prose—that is, the thing it does better than any other form (movies, songs, sculpture, tweets, television, you name it)—is voice. A great writer mimicking, on the page, the dynamic energy of human thought is about as close as we can get to modelling pure empathy.

Grace Paley is one of the great writers of voice of the last century. There’s an experience one has reading a stylist like her that has to do with how rich in truth the phrase-or-sentence-level bursts are and how quickly they follow upon one another. An image or phrase finds you, pleases you with its wit or vividness, shoehorns open your evolving vision of the fictive world, and before that change gets fully processed, here comes another. You find yourself having trouble believing this much wit is washing over you. A world is appearing before you that is richer and stranger than you could possibly have imagined, and that world gains rooms and vistas and complications with every phrase. What you are experiencing is intimate contact with an extraordinary intelligence, which causes the pleasant sensation of one’s personality receding and being replaced by the writer’s consciousness.

Paley’s approach is to make a dazzling verbal surface that doesn’t so much linearly represent the world as remind us of its dazzle. Mere straightforward representation is not her game. In fact, she seems to say, the world has no need to be represented: there it is, all around us, all the time. What it needs is to be loved better. Or maybe: what we need is to be reminded to love it, and to be shown how, because sometimes, busy as we get trying to stay alive, loving the world slips our mind.

I’d always thought of Paley as a realist, but immersing myself again in her work, I find that she is actually a thrilling post-modernist, in cahoots with her pal Donald Barthelme to remind us that, yes, there certainly is a World, and there is the Word with which to describe it, and normally World and Word seem like two separate things, but with sufficient authorial attention, World and Word can be made to pop back into their proper relation, which is: unity.

What I mean by this is that, as you read a Paley story, you will find that it is, yes, set in our world (New York City, most often), and that, O.K., it seems concerned with normal-enough things (love, divorce, politics, a day at the park), but then you will start to notice that the language is . . . uncommon. Not quite of this world.

Here is a character in “An Interest in Life,” speaking (at a normal-enough kitchen table) of his relation to the Church: “You know . . . we iconoclasts . . . we freethinkers . . . we latter-day Masons . . . we idealists . . . we dreamers . . . we are never far from our nervous old mother, the Church. She is never far from us . . . Wherever we are, we can hear, no matter how faint, her hourly bells, tolling the countryside, reverberating in the cities, bringing in our civilized minds the passionate deed of Mary. Every hour on the hour we are startled with remembrance of what was done for us. FOR US.”

Not your normal post-breakfast speech.

Well, yes and no.

Like her hero Isaac Babel, the great Russian writer, Paley understood that just because such language doesn’t normally get spoken aloud in the so-called real world, that does not make it unreal, or contrived. On the contrary: language like this is the real language going on in the head of man all the time, whether he can articulate it or not. I find a Shakespearean quality in Paley; the people are very real there on the stage, in their faded coats and crooked hair-bows and so on, but their talking is coming from a higher realm, and it has been elevated like that in order to parse and contemplate the big questions with maximal efficiency.

But all of this is done with a wondrous ear and a love for the vernacular. Have we had another American writer better at celebrating the poetry in which we Americans think, and into which we sometimes erupt? “You see I can crack a little joke because look at this pleasure,” for example. Or: “No reason to worry about me, I got a lot of irons in the fire. I get advanced all the time, matter of fact.”

Another writer might say, of a group of teachers just pre-Christmas, “They, each of them, were remembering some happy incident from their own childhood holidays, and this made them happy.” (Very nice.) Paley says, “They teachers became happier and happier. Their heads were ringing like the bells of childhood.” (Boom.) Instead of simply knowing that the teachers were happy pre-Christmas, we are, for that split second, happy teachers, pre-Christmas. (We smell the pine from the crookedly hanging wreath near the bulletin board that will be brown by the time school resumes, in January.) Another writer might have a character tell her mother to keep her opinions about men to herself; Paley has the narrator of “A Woman, Young and Old” advise dear mother to “keep your taste in your own hatch.” Which of us, trying to communicate to our sister that we feel she somewhat underestimates the extent of our worldliness, would think to tell her, as Aunt Rose does in “Goodbye and Good Luck,” that our “heart is a regular college of feelings and there is such information between my corset and me that (your) whole married life is a kindergarten.” Well, take that, sister.

“You’ve used me in a bad way. That’s not cool. That smells under heaven,” Dennis the cab-driver/lover/songwriter says, par crapamundo, in “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.”

Or how about this, from “Ruthy and Edie”? “If you said the word ‘city’ to Edie, or even the cool adjective ‘municipal,’ specific children usually sitting at the back of the room appeared before her eyes and refused to answer when she called on them.”

This is what I mean by the unity of Word and World: something about the arrangement of the words, read in the context of the story, will not (will no longer) let us experience these sentences as mere words on a page. The words sort of recede as you read them, or, maybe, our attention diverts from their wordness, to the “image” that appears in our head (although “image” is not quite right; it is something else going on up there), and suddenly—are we reading, or living “there” in that fictive moment?

Yes.

All these agitated manic New York voices explaining themselves! You feel the stress and pace and wild aspirations of the city as it was. And is. The city is the energy coming off a million hustling souls who have both forgotten they will die soon and are very actively feeling that, ah God, they most definitely will. So what do they do? They talk. They protest, explain, beg to differ. In Paley you hear America singing, yes, but also: belly-aching, kvetching, teasing, advocating, disowning, politicizing, explaining the states of their bodies, assessing friends, lovers, and their children with both clinical distance and aching love, sometimes in the same sentence. When I think to myself, “What was the world of American adults like, back before I was one, in the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies?” my mind turns to Paley’s stories. All those desirous, active souls, with one foot in hippiedom/free love (singing crazy songs by bands named the Lepers—formerly the Split Atom, possibly soon WinterMoss), and the other in the Depression, dusty old progressive dreams in their heads (of Guthrie, of the Wobblies), so alive with the tremendous energy that generation expended to make things better (“the vigiling fasting praying in or out / of jail their lightheartedness which floated / about the year’s despair”). However, these firebrands were sometimes depressingly human in their desire to wring the most out of life and one another. And now those people are old, going or gone. Paley’s stories remind us that our present vitality—our sense of being the first humans ever, and permanent—will, too, someday seem “historical,” and will have passed. But, in her particular, larger-than-life way, she also makes these people live forever: particularized receptacles of the eternal.

Any object, any human gesture, contains an infinity of language with which it might be described. But through habituation, or paucity of talent, or lack of originality, most of us, writing, reach for the most workaday speech-tools, and in this way the world is made dull. Here comes Paley: seemingly incapable of a banal sentence, a loose observation, or a distracted fictive moment.