A L S O +T O D A Y Hollywood swingers By Ray Sawhill The heroes of America's film renaissance were brought down by their excesses, two new books argue -- and they took American cinema with them T A B L E+T A L K Who or what killed the New Yorker? Is it really dead? Share your thoughts in the Books area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Remote Feed By David Gilbert Fiction (04/21/98) Bitch By Elizabeth Wurtzel Nonfiction (04/20/98) Sleeping Where I Fall By Peter Coyote Nonfiction (04/17/98) For Your Own Good By Jacob Sullum Nonfiction (04/16/98) The Boys of My Youth By Jo Ann Beard Nonfiction (04/15/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SEARCH REVIEWS BY: title of book author publisher reviewer F E A T U R E Damascus Gate Reviewed by Robert Alter In "Damascus Gate," accomplished novelist Robert Stone succumbs to the lurid blandishments of formula fiction		J U S T__A S__I__T H O U G H T BY GRACE PALEY FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX NONFICTION 224 PAGES BY SCOTT McLEMEE | It always amuses me when conservatives denounce the left as "anti-family." For if ever a group of people acted like a noisy, multigenerational household, it would be the left's sprawling cohort of socialists, anarchists, pacifists and other congenital rebels. It is not, for the most part, a happy clan. Some members won't speak to the rest -- except to yell. And at times the ideological fault lines run right through families in the ordinary sense. (Allen Ginsberg's father was a socialist and his mother a communist; so for a whole epoch of the poet's childhood, Mom considered Dad a "social fascist.") In recent years, we've adopted all these postmodernists, forever "performing an anti-essentialist critique of late-capitalist patriarchy." Kids these days, with their crazy lingo -- nobody understands what the hell they're talking about. More lucid, by far, is Grace Paley -- the laureate of radical family values. In her poems and stories, scenes from ordinary daily life, written in luminous but plainspoken language, sit side-by-side with tales of the struggle for a peaceful, just world. Her new book, "Just As I Thought," assembles a few dozen essays, speeches and literary odds and ends from decades past. It is a literary and political miscellany: a nonfiction companion to recent editions of Paley's collected poetry and short fiction. There are memoirs of growing up in a socialist household, getting an abortion in the '50s, going to Vietnam, meeting dissidents in Moscow, opposing the Gulf War. There are pages written in admiration of Isaac Babel and Christa Wolf, and to mourn the death of her friend Donald Barthelme. Many of the articles were (so to speak) written on the way to a demonstration, or just after. None was composed for posterity. Yet they are, I think, very much of a piece with the author's other work -- and not simply at the level of ideological commitment. Paley is an anarchist and a pacifist. Her first book, "The Little Disturbances of Man" (1959), displayed a marked feminist sensibility. But neither theory nor polemic interest her as much as the language and situations of everyday life; and this comes across even in the most engaged bits of activist prose. Some years ago, in an interview with the Threepenny Review (not reprinted here), Paley expressed her distaste for the "fiction/nonfiction" distinction: "I mean you're either a storyteller, an inventor in language or event ... a poet of storytelling -- or you're not." She is especially concerned with the storytelling that takes place -- or should, anyway -- within families. In a set of lecture notes, she urges young writers to spend less time on journals ("When you find only yourself interesting, you're boring") and more on listening to the tales available if you go looking: "At Christmas time or Passover supper, extract a story from the oldest persons, told them by the oldest persons they remember. That will remind us of history." Good advice -- if also somewhat anachronistic in a consumer society that undermines all sense of the past, then sells you tickets to Colonial Williamsburg. But it has worked beautifully for Grace Paley. Readers of her fiction may recall a character whose uncle died in pre-revolutionary Russia, killed in a demonstration while carrying a banner. One of her essays recalls the origins of that story in a conversation, years ago, with an aunt: "Darling, she said, I know you want to go to the May Day parade with your friends, but you know what? Don't carry the flag. I want you to go. I didn't say you don't go. But don't carry the flag. The one who carries the flag is sometimes killed. The police go crazy when they see that flag. "I had dreamed of going forth with a flag -- the American flag on July 4, the red flag of the workers on May Day. How did the aunt know this? Because I know you inside out, she said, since you were born. Aren't you my child, too?" SALON | April 22, 1998 Scott McLemee is a contributing editor at Lingua Franca and a regular contributor to Salon.