The first story here, about a young punk hustler - "How Mickey Made
It" - has some of the onyx-outlaw quality of Phillips' for-effect
debut collection, Black Tickets (1979); and two longer pieces -
"Bess" and "Blue Moon" - could be discarded chapters from Phillips'
novel Machine Dreams (1984) and its conventional, preppy, though at
times moving, purview of the family-as-universe. The rest - as
Phillips tests new boundaries - is more interesting. A writer good
at retrospect, a summarizer of lost times bounding over years and
lives, she does best of all with "Rayme": a frighteningly deranged
girl who finds sanctuary (up to a point) in a 70's commune.
"Something That Happened" puts the narrative spotlight on a
divorced mother of young adult children who's being pressured to
join into a life style she's ambivalent about having - any life
style - and there's a power of sympathy through distance to it
that's effective. But when Phillips writes a story trying for the
illusion of events unfolding in the now, she flounders. The
hitchhiking girl and shadowy male companion of the title story are
pushed to the limits of preposterousness by Bogart-movie dialogue
like: "'Don't call me sweetheart, and I didn't say they weren't
perceptive or frustrated. I said their isolation was real, not an
illusion. They stayed in one place and sank with whatever they had.
But us - look at us. Roads. Sensation, floating, maps into more of
the same. It's a blur, a pattern, a view from an airplane.'"
Overall, then: a few good stories, but otherwise unfocused, often
heavy-footed work. (Kirkus Reviews)
Three new stories are collected in this edition for the first time.
In Alma an adolescent daughter is made the confidante of her lonely
mother; Counting traces the history of a doomed love affair; and
Callie evokes memories of the haunting death of a child in 1920s
West Virginia.
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