SOURCE: “Without Commitment,” in Times Literary Supplement, September 11–17, 1987, p. 978.

In the following review, Wiggins complains, “Unfortunately, in Fast Lanes, Phillips seems to have fallen victim to her own style.”

All of the seven short stories in Jayne Anne Phillips's second collection, Fast Lanes, are told in the first-person singular—six of them by people who are variously described by their circumstances as girls or female adolescents, or young or old or middle-aged women, even though each sounds the same. “I had plans”, one of them says. “Maybe I was in training to become my mother, become that kind of … unfulfilled woman, vigilant and damaged.”

The character who says this is a teenager called Danner, but the way she speaks does not distinguish her from the old woman Bess, or the mother of Angela, or Kate, or any of the other narrators. Names, or their calculated absence, rather than...