Critical Essay | Critical Review by Andrew Delbanco

Critical Review by Andrew Delbanco

SOURCE: A review of Shelter, in New Republic, Vol. 211, No. 26, December 26, 1994, pp. 39–40.

In the following review, Delbanco discusses childhood memories and the themes of good and evil in Phillips's Shelter.

Long before Jayne Anne Phillips conceived of Shelter as a full-scale novel, she composed a short passage that eventually became its opening paragraph. It was an account of a young girl seeking respite from the “heat of noon” in the bunkhouse of a girls' camp during a West Virginian summer. “I think I wrote Shelter,” Phillips says, “in order to understand that paragraph.” Standing alone as a kind of epigraph in front of the narrative proper, it draws the reader into an archetypal American experience, the world of campfires and chill morning swims and nighttime whispering within the protective sound-screen of the crickets. It asks us to “concede the heat of noon in summer camps”...
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