Survival Rates

Clyde's collection of short stories explores not so much what has already happened but what happens next, showing how sometimes the most difficult part of life's misfortunes is trying to find a way to go on.

Low-key and bland on the surface, the Southwestern characters of Clyde's restrained first collection (winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction) stay matter-of-fact in the face of alarming circumstance. "Farming Butterflies" introduces a sensitive teenage boy to his mother's dearest friend, the "precarious" Deirdre, whose affinity for bright foods and search for spiritual ascension put a sunny face on desperation and suicidal tendencies. In "Jumping," a woman remembers the ski-lift accident that she survived but that killed her schoolmate Veronica when they were 13: "What I know is that if she'd lived I'd have completely forgotten her... in her death I was caught, frozen in my indifference." Many of the characters in these nine tales come from Mormon families, and address unsettling events with the blank confidence of faith: "Mormons hope tragedy improves the soul," one survivor claims. The successful plastic surgeon in "Howard Johnson's House" struggles to sympathize with his insufferable and socially ambitious mother when she reveals her illness to be "t-e-r-m-i-n-a-l." Grief, disappointment and loss test the mettle and change the contours of these people's lives. But while Clyde's omniscient, smooth-browed confidence makes the stories a pleasure to read, sometimes her determinedly straightforward prose could use some graceful arpeggios.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Decently done but unremarkable debut collection, the recipient of this years Flannery OConnor Award for Short Fiction. Most of the characters heremany of them Mormons, almost all living in the American Southwestare either sick or connected intimately with sickness or tragedy. How they face the distress at hand becomes a measure of their character. Cecil, the nose surgeon of Howard Johnsons House, has to carry on with his daily routine of facial reconstructions even as his mother Edna lies dying, beyond his assistance. Anna and Nicole, the two teenaged cancer patients of Krista Had a Treble Clef Rose, carry on with all the normal occupations of adolescencecrushes on boys, preparations for dances, fantasies about their futuresfrom the oncology ward of the hospital where theyve met. A Good Paved Road describes a religious dilemma: a high school girl tries to convert her boyfriend to the Mormon Church she grew up in, then loses her faith when she fails. And in Victors Funeral Urn, a recently divorced wife whos contemplating a reunion with her ex-husband happens upon an urn containing what appear to be human ashes on the side of a roadand then tries to locate the owner. Jumping finds a woman still haunted by a skiing accident 33 years after the fact. The best of the lot is the title story, describing the dual traumas of a husband being treated for thyroid cancer and of the wife whose exhaustion over his disease prompts her to leave him. Clyde knows her world well and manages to offer a fair representation of it, but theres a lack of depth to her sketches that make them seen like just thatquick studies. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.