Fast Lanes

Jayne Anne Phillips has deragatorily been called a "regional writer". Her vivid descriptions of underprivileged people, sex, drugs, violence & dire strait have earned her a reputation of an unconventional, "wayward" author. Phillips is an outstanding stylist. Excessive use of metaphors is a major characteristic of her craft. Recurring themes are the loss of paradise - due to radical social shift and the loss of childlike innocence - & encounters with people on the very edge of society. In "Fast Lanes" Phillips offers a literary inventory of contemporary America. She outlines a generation doomed by the shadow and echo of the Vietnam War, being disoriented and suffering from existential doubts. All her stories have a psychologial ring to them showing the inner feelings of mostly female protagonists. Behind their facade they display unstable emotions and a feeling of defeat. Exhausted and powerless, these protagonists resign to their fate. Everyone seems to be in a twilight zone. The tone is one of latent and more or less hidden melancholy. Phillips writes in the tradition of the "Beat Generation" since it conveys hurry, rootlessness but also ultimate experience. Phillips started her career as a poet; the intensity of her narrative style points to this fact and makes reading her short stories seem more like reading prose poems.