SOURCE: “Look Homeward, Angels,” in Nation, November 14, 1994, pp. 585–88.

In the following review, Schwartz expresses disappointment with the ending of Phillips's Shelter and complains, “Somehow the mythic quality of the story and the accumulation of heavily weighted symbols, of snakes, caves, angels and devils, seem a pesky shorthand and detraction from Phillips's otherwise supple storytelling.”

For Jayne Anne Phillips, tragedy and loss are endemic to American families, as persistent and insidious as cancer and as ordinary as groceries. She stalks generations of small-town West Virginia families through wars, affairs, economic crises and abuse and finds inside their heads a loose weave of memory, dreams and sensations periodically torn asunder by horror and death. Her fiction is keenly observed, her details razor-sharp, her dreams triple-cream rich; even if her dazzling skills fade in the reader's memory, a sense of melancholy lingers. Children grow, generations fall away, and underneath the passage...