Jayne Ann Phillips' volume of short stories, Black Tickets … comes garlanded with quotes about its author's "early genius" and its "crooked beauty."… Perhaps if I had not been expecting so much I would not have felt so grievously let down by this reputed éminence jeune. With one or two exceptions, I find these stories to be artsy, derivative and unconvincing. There are many portraits of those who walk on the wild side—strippers, hookers, pimps, nymphomaniacs, drug-dealers, and the generally crazy. Phillips recounts their stories with a studied, infinitely irritating mixture of street language and blowzy writing-class prose….
Sometimes she sounds like Gertrude Stein: "It was spring it was raining it was the ambulance almost pretty in the dark." ("Snow") Another story begins like a parody of any one of a number of Southern Gothic writers: "In 1934 I was seven years old. Bellington, Virginia, was a Depression town. My mother was twenty-eight, my father fifty, my grandmother sixty-two. We lived in a big falling house in the center of town; but in those days, forty years ago, even town people had some land, barns in back. We had cows, some chickens. If it weren't for them we'd have starved because my father was crazy." ("1934") Many physical details seem to be conjured up merely to provide an opportunity for pretty fussing: "They all had moles near their lips, dark little pigments ignored and sexual. The dark spots rose like tiny scarabs on their faces." ("Gemcrack")
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