Seeing Sunny Again

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By William Reimers

There is something quietly audacious about a writer who sets out to trace an entire human life across a collection of short stories, and Paul Clayton pulls it off with considerable grace. Seeing Sunny Again follows the arc from childhood to old age, gathering its characters at the moments that actually shape a life: the early stirrings of desire, the particular disorientation of serving in a foreign war, the tentative negotiations of young love, the fractures of marriage and divorce, the complicated tenderness of single parenthood. By the final stories, the light has shifted and his characters are facing what comes last, and the collection lands there with an earned weight that the earlier pieces have been quietly building toward.

Clayton writes the kind of fiction that refuses to sentimentalize ordinary experience even as it insists on its significance. In “The Trick,” a lonely teenager is manipulated into asking out a girl he never would have approached on his own, and the story finds its sting not in cruelty but in the particular humiliation of being seen clearly by someone who does not care what they find. “Fly Sense” follows a young soldier utterly unable to absorb the senselessness of death in wartime, the mind refusing what the body already knows. “From China with Love” takes a man to Beijing with a woman he thinks he understands, only to discover how thoroughly a person can remain a stranger. These are small devastations, rendered without melodrama.

The later stories are equally precise. “The Ledger” gives us a dying man who refuses every accommodation his condition demands, making his adult son’s caretaking an exercise in helpless love. “Two, Too, To” follows a destitute immigrant woman weighing two very different American men as potential partners in raising her child, a choice that carries the full weight of survival. “Sunday Evening Comin’ Down” may be the most affecting story in the collection: a divorced father, well meaning and utterly at sea, trying to reach his six-year-old daughter across the distance his absence has already created.

Seventeen stories in all, each one a window into middle class American life in the twentieth century. What holds them together is a quality of attention. Clayton is genuinely interested in how a life accumulates, how the person the child was persists inside the aging adult, and how loss and longing change shape over decades without ever quite disappearing.

About the Author

Paul Clayton

Paul Clayton is the author of a three-book historical series on the Spanish Conquest of the Floridas-- Calling Crow, Flight of the Crow, and Calling Crow Nation (Putnam/Berkley), and a novel, Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam (St. Martin's Press), based on his own experiences in that war.

Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam was a finalist at the 2001 Frankfurt eBook Awards, along with works by Joyce Carol Oates (Faithless), David McCullough (John Adams), and Alan Furst (The Kingdom of Shadows).

Clayton's historical novel -- White Seed: The Untold Story of the Lost Colony of Roanoke -- explores the mystery of the vanished English colonists on Roanoke Island. His realistic contemporary novel, In the Shape of a Man, explores the dark side of the go-go lifestyle of turn-of-the-century Silicon Valley workers. 

Clayton's collection of traditional sci-fi and fantasy stories, Strange Worlds, pays homage to the sci-fi greats. Clayton’s novel, Van Ripplewink: You Can’t Go Home Again, is a modern twist on the classic Rip Van Winkle story, that wades into America’s current socio-racial dysfunction. Clayton's novella, Crossing Over, tells the story of the 2nd American civil war. His latest sci-fi collection, Talk to a Real, Live Girl, tells of a future world where the MeToo movement and the sophistication of robotic companions... collide with unforeseen and astounding consequences.