The Limit of Delta Y Over Delta X

Claire Wilkshire is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of
British Columbia.

This collection of 13 stories focuses on the lives of parents,
adolescents, and schoolteachers. For the most part, the success of each
story seems to be determined by the choice of protagonist.

The fictions about delinquent juveniles (“The Limit of Delta Y over
Delta X,” “The Sound He Made,” “How Do You Expect to Make Your
Way?”) tend toward sensational violence. The young characters are less
credible than their adult counterparts and the language they speak
(especially in the first-person narrations) might be authentic, but that
does not make it any less tiresome. The stories that deal with the lives
of teachers (such as “Mr. Denham” and “La Gargouille”) make
their lives sound unutterably dull; perhaps they are, but the stories
should not be. By far the most successful stories are those in which the
author shows the complexity and subtlety of domestic relations (“Shel
Do the Right Thang” and “When I Get Back from the Holy Land”).
Here he capably evokes the distances between people who live together
and their ambivalence toward one another, while at the same time
celebrating proximity and understanding, however hard-won.

Richard Cumyn’s first collection is uneven and at times burdened by
melodrama and overworked metaphor (not to mention a cumbersome title),
but his best stories are warm, perceptive, and ironic.