Jayne Anne Phillips Critical Essay | Critical Review by Mary Hawthorne

Critical Review by Mary Hawthorne

SOURCE: “Carry on Camping,” in London Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 7, April 6, 1995, p. 24.

In the following review, Hawthorne provides a negative assessment of Phillips's Shelter, complaining about what she sees as a lack of logic and psychological development.

Jayne Anne Phillips's first novel of more than a decade ago, Machine Dreams, reconstructed the history of three generations of a single middle-class, small-town American family over the course of some fifty years. From the perspective, by turns, of parents and children, she contemplated the complexities and banalities of relations among family members against the political background of the time, focusing on the far-ranging effects that were brought to bear by the Second World War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. The book's scope was seemingly broad, but it was Phillips's rendering of ordinariness that made it resonate. The locale might have been virtually any small...
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