Survival Rates [Paperback]

Mary Clyde (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2001

Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. "Finely crafted short fiction that explores the aftermath of life-threatening events. . . . Sculpted prose." —Booklist

Mary Clyde’s stories explore not so much what has happened already but what happens next. Illness bristles through the book, magnifying emotional undercurrents: two teenage girls survive surgery and the prospect of never eating popcorn again; the stoicism of a husband with cancer infuriates his wife. Set in the desert Southwest, these stories show the influence of a landscape populated with cat-eating coyotes and car-crushing boulders. The characters are relative newcomers, some sharing the author’s Mormon heritage. But they are survivors, relying on the ironies and blessings of ongoing life.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The nine stories in Mary Clyde's debut collection are populated by people in crisis. There are cancer victims and divorcees, doctors with personal problems and boyfriends with inferiority complexes. Some of the pieces are downright hilarious, others are quietly ironic, but all are branded with Clyde's offbeat perspective and quirky prose. Consider the title story, in which a married landscape architect is abashed by the form of cancer he's diagnosed with: "Dr. Rodgers, insisting that cancers have personalities, has told them thyroid cancer lacks any real oncological ambition." Bad enough to have cancer to begin with, but to be afflicted by "an embarrassment to the whole cancer community" is the straw that eventually breaks the architect's marriage. Both the humor and the cancer are deadlier in "Krista Had a Treble Clef Rose," in which two teenage girls who have met on an oncology ward fight to maintain their sense of normalcy in the face of surgeries, restricted diets, and ostomy bags: "I've got three hairs left," one tells the other at a lunch counter in a mall. "I'm playing up my eyes."

Not every story is about death, per se, though the dead figure into most of them. In "Victor's Funeral Urn," for example, a divorced woman and her young son find a container of ashes by the roadside and are swept up in a search for its next of kin. And in "Pruitt Love" a young man intimidated by his girlfriend's eccentric family attempts to equalize the playing field by using his mother's death as a conversation piece. Love, faith, death, and plastic surgery are just a few of the themes Mary Clyde touches on in Survival Rates, a collection infused with wit, compassion, and a deep wellspring of hope. --Alix Wilber --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (February 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393320847
• ISBN-13: 978-0393320848
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,818,097 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Stories that subtly transform the everyday, August 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Survival Rates: Stories (Hardcover)

Mary Clyde's first book of stories won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction from the University of Georgia. These nine stories, some of which are more successful than others, focus upon instances of everyday life, both tragic and comic. Clyde's stories are populated by mothers and husbands, sons and daughters, girlfriends and boyfriends. There is nothing extraordinary about any of her characters, except perhaps their ability to comment upon their own lives and the lives of those around them. What is it, then, that makes the book worth seeking out and certainly worth reading?

In her best stories, Mary Clyde's strength as a writer who explores the hidden depths within a character's seemingly mundane existence is on prominent display. Her tools are often simply objects that fall into her characters' lives. In the best story here, "Victor's Funeral Urn," a young divorced mother finds, by the side of the road, an urn containing a baby's ashes, which she takes home intending to somehow return it to its rightful owner. Through the unlikely presence of the urn in her home, she reaches a new understanding of her son's, and her own, loneliness and despair. In another story, the powerful "Jumping," Clyde explores how the survivors of a tragic accident are just as much victims as those who lost their lives.

Though a couple of these stories seem formulaic or contrived, the majority of the writing here is distinguished by a lightness of touch and a willingness to let her characters speak for themselves that is refreshing at a time when many writers seem to be preaching at their readers. I applaud Mary Clyde's understated achievement in this book and will certainly be looking forward to her next.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars this book made me cry, September 20, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Survival Rates: Stories (Hardcover)

The short stories in this book are each days out of what could be anyone's life, that's what makes it so touching. If anyone who likes this book and has feminist tendencies, I would also recommmend "the furies" by Janet Hobhouse.

5.0 out of 5 stars Touching stories that fill your life, August 14, 2008

By 

Nathaniel Curtis - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Survival Rates (Paperback)

Clyde achieved something wonderful with survival rates. Her stories are of the strangers we exchange smiles with on the street. Through Clyde's stories we see in the inner turmoil that could afflict anyone. The hidden pain and struggles that we are forced by society to supress.

I picked up Survival Rates to read on business trips. I now carry an extra copy with me to give to whoever is sitting next to me on the plane. It is wonderful book with stories that can be read and shared again and again.