Jayne Anne Phillips | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 4 pages of analysis & critique of Jayne Anne Phillips.
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Jayne Anne Phillips | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 4 pages of analysis & critique of Jayne Anne Phillips.
This section contains 936 words
(approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Review by Richard Eder

SOURCE: A review of Fast Lanes, in Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 19, 1987, pp. 3, 11.

In the following review, Eder praises the stories in Phillips's Fast Lanes.

Even though her ear for numb and displaced American voices is as sharp as that of any of her fellow writers, Jayne Anne Phillips does not, like the cooler practitioners, turn her stories entirely over to them.

She has a middle distance. She doesn't rule her characters, as in older styles of short-story writing. But she doesn't leave them by themselves, either.

The reader senses a listener as well as a voice. It is a listener who seeks the voice out; one who is interested in the characters, feelings, fates and souls of a wide variety of lives operating at all manner of temperatures. The listener is silent, maybe only implicit; but, as Strindberg and Beckett have shown, a speech to a...

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This section contains 936 words
(approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Review by Richard Eder
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Critical Review by Richard Eder from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.