Jayne Anne Phillips delves deep into the psyche, exploring how the stark realities of life intrude upon the mind. Her characters, shaped by the chaotic world around them, often appear fragile and emotionally tumultuous. In her extended narrative "El Paso," recounted from multiple perspectives, a character describes the sky as "opening up like a hole"—an image epitomizing disorientation. Her protagonists perpetually encounter loss: perhaps a displacement caused by betrayal or neglect, or the heart-wrenching loss of a beloved to illness or insanity. This literature of grief, of the outsider, and of madness often teeters on the edge of extremity. Yet, frequently, a character's innocence crumbles, and with it, their grasp on reality as the simplicity of childhood fades away into the harsh experiences of illness, death, and alienation. In "The Heavenly Animal," a young woman, before meeting her lover, lets her estranged father wash her car. "No one will ever help you but your family," he asserts. Shortly thereafter, she collides with a deer, halts, and realizes "there was really nowhere to go."

The brief, fragmented pieces are intense prose poems, their feverish language often teetering on excess, highlighting the sense of separation. These vivid moments, frequently tinged with a sexual undertone, imprint themselves with photographic precision onto the consciousness of the character. Childhood innocence stands corrupted. In "Sweethearts," the female narrator recalls her ritual visits to the cinema every Friday and Sunday. On Fridays, she and her friends would crouch in the balcony's back row as "sacred grunts rose in black corners," marking their initiation into the enigmas of puberty and sexuality. Yet, on Sundays, the gaunt theater manager would only grant them phone access after pulling them near and addressing them as "Sweethearts," a twisted mockery of genuine affection.

Phillips's characters do not simply exist within society's tapestry; they precariously balance on its fissures. They embody a world where shared ideals and enduring commitments seem to have evaporated. They mature in a society fraught with turbulence, where the center has failed to hold. In such an era, the supposed stability of the middle class appears as delicate as the precarious lives of society's marginalized, a theme persistently echoed throughout the book's narrative structure.