[In the following excerpt, Someif lauds the stories in Fast Lanes, saying, “… Jayne Anne Phillips moves with assurance and charm.”]

Fast Lanes inspired in me the same sort of feeling that I imagine Iran must have aroused in Diane Johnson. This is a foreign land, a land where people have names like Danner, Thurman and Kato, where, in the normal course of things, they take mescaline and coke, share houses with TM instructors and have lovers who have dropped out of Harvard Law School to become carpenters. And yet, is it so strange after all? It's still a land where men get lost at sea, where women talk to their unborn babies, where brothers and sisters love each other as only brothers and sisters can and where people are, on the whole, out of communication. The first story in the collection is an unremitting monologue: Mickey, the young, aspiring rockstar-cum-gigolo talks non-stop while his older lover contents herself with very occasional asides to the audience describing his appearance and his actions. From the rockspeak of ‘How Mickey Made It’ to the elegiac Fin-de-Siècle ‘Bess’ to the surrealistic ‘Bluegill’, Jayne Anne Phillips moves with assurance and charm. She creates haunting landscapes out of snow, summer woods, a girls' changing-room and, occasionally, the odd, arresting image: ‘something dead was out there, yellowed like the dust and lacy with vanishing.’ Deborah Moggach's world is made sad by betrayal. What is it that makes Jayne Anne Phillips's world so sad? Maybe it's because there, the enemy is not marriage or men or the Shah or any particular person or thing, but the same old Empedoclean ennui—as Shinner Black in ‘Blue Moon’ says, ‘people can't live in this world.’