Survival Rates by Mary Clyde. University of Georgia Press: 161 pages.

If the Southwest hasn’t been flattened into kitsch, it is almost there. Out of a dizzy dust storm of native, pioneer, and entrepreneur, emerge the Kokopelis, the crystals, the dream-catchers, the coyotes, the painted plates. Mary Clyde’s “Survival Rates” (winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction) struggles out of kitsch by demonstrating a simultaneous fondness for and rejection of Southwestern clichés.

Clyde’s characters are modern pioneers, stumbling—despite illness of the body or thirst of the soul--through the strange and lonely landscapes of their lives. And their survival rates are high, as Clyde’s dangerous world is built on a foundation of hope; even in the desert, one might be cleansed in a small way by the dry wind.

In the collection’s first story, “Howard Johnson’s House,” Cecil, a plastic surgeon, is obsessed with Howard Johnson, considering Hojo’s a kind of church. He even lives in a house built by Howard Johnson (it has an orange roof, of course). Cecil learns that his mother is dying and he comes to a moment where he must resolve his fractured relationship with her. The way he comes to know himself is funny and tender, his redemption not large, but significant. It occurs in a hospital, where he risks his career to fix a little girl’s awful nose.

A number of Clyde’s characters get epiphanies in hospitals, which are more like churches, complete with attendants, juxtaposed against the natural landscape, like those giant gift shop teepees by which all southwest travelers, no matter where they are going, must pass. In a moral desert, you look for grace where you can find it.

In “Krista Had a Treble Clef Rose,” two girls, Anne and Nicole, relearn to be teenagers after surviving an unnamed illness and serious surgery which leave them with a new language that includes “stoma” and “colostomy bag.” Clyde reassures us that they will survive the jolt to their teenagehood, in the white church of sickness and healing.

In the title story, which is also the best story, a relationship is renegotiated in the shadow of cancer. Wilson, a victim of thyroid cancer, must face his wife’s grief, as well as his own serious illness. Contemplating an evening storm, Wilson thinks: “They could light those fat candles . . . and wrap themselves in his grandmother’s drunkard’s-progress quilt, abandon themselves to the theatrics of nature: the woeful ponderosa pines, the thunder vengeful as the Old Testament. But storms make Janice tense; she dislikes weather.” She also fears javelinas and a precarious rock formation which she feels might crush a car. And it might. This is a land where nature equals God, where we are at the mercy of the natural landscape, which includes our bodies and our passions.

These stories seem to have a complex Christian (perhaps Mormon, like some of the characters) leitmotif, which means tales of sacrifice and redemption, journeys in the wilderness, moral resolution. To be uncomfortable with the Southwestern landscape is to be uncomfortable with nature or God or destiny toward which one ambles along in a “drunkard’s-progress.”

It’s true that Mary Clyde succeeds in complicating Christian images while still maintaining their influence and power over people’s choices. Still, there is another aspect of her presentation of white middle class angst that will make some readers deeply comfortable while making others bristle. She presents this perspective as though it contains some universality which is simply not present. Some readers may find the stories disturbing—not critical enough, not deep enough. Other readers, however, will slip into these stories like well-worn slippers after a hard day’s work. And for those feet the stories work beautifully. Clyde reminds us, in every line, of nature’s power and unnoticed everpresence. As one character enters a parking lot, Clyde whispers in an almost-aside, “the Verde River runs along the highway, changing the air, cooling and stirring it.”

    Wendy L. Smith teaches English at San Diego Mesa College.