As several critics point out, Phillips is centrally concerned in giving voice to the inarticulate outcasts of society, whether they happen to be familiar suburban victims of recent social upheavals or dispossessed (even deranged) members of the underclass.

This mixture of familiar middle-class situations with the plights of outsiders makes the book an excellent one for study: first, it contains a range of situations and literary influences, a characteristic typical of the writing-workshop generation; second, it dramatizes the widely-held assumption that everyone in the contemporary age, whether well -off or barely surviving, is shell-shocked from cultural disintegration. Black Tickets consists of eleven longer stories counterpointed by sixteen short fragments, a couple of them only a paragraph. While most critics prefer the longer stories and find some of the shorter ones overwritten, they agree that both allow the inarticulate members of society to speak for themselves in...