[In the following review, Delbanco discusses childhood memories and the themes of good and evil in Phillips's Shelter.]

Long before Jayne Anne Phillips conceived of Shelter as a full-scale novel, she composed a short passage that eventually became its opening paragraph. It was an account of a young girl seeking respite from the “heat of noon” in the bunkhouse of a girls' camp during a West Virginian summer. “I think I wrote Shelter,” Phillips says, “in order to understand that paragraph.” Standing alone as a kind of epigraph in front of the narrative proper, it draws the reader into an archetypal American experience, the world of campfires and chill morning swims and nighttime whispering within the protective sound-screen of the crickets. It asks us to “concede the heat of noon in summer camps” and to recall the embarrassment of going to the counselors to plead faintness, then the relief of finding sanctuary within “the rough wooden walls exuding shade.” It invites us to feel how the heat has come over you, settled in from above and sucked your insides until you must lie down to sleep in the empty cabin while the rest are at hiking or canoes or archery … in your mind, you see the bodies lying there, each in its own future. You are frightened because it is you here with the future.

Relinquishing this slightly imperious second-person singular, the novel quickly settles into a third-person voice for telling its several tangent stories—beginning with the family memories of 15-year-old Lenny Swenson and her younger sister, Alma, a few cabins away. One of Phillips's gifts is an ability to build coherent fictions out of a range of voices. Ever since the early stories of Black Tickets (1979) and Fast Lanes (1987), she has been able to write in the idiom of the trailer-park Mama as comfortably as in that of the bookish dreamer. In Shelter, where each chapter amounts to an interior monologue belonging to a different consciousness, her virtuosity is on full display.

The result is a novel that has the quality of an extended eavesdrop. We overhear Lenny telling her friend Catherine (Cap) Briarley about the night she came downstairs late and saw her mother pressed against the kitchen counter by a man who was biting and kissing her. The memory of that sight is enfolded within the memory of her confiding it to Cap a few weeks later, and of Cap's excited emulation as she listens, “grabbing Lenny, lying on her, sucking at her shoulder to make a warm, soft bruise.” Afterward, Lenny remembers, they coiled “together like eels in the wide tub,” then wrapped themselves naked in the old rabbit coats Cap's mother stored in the closet. The skins were torn, the silk linings soiled; Cap would turn the coats inside out and the girls pulled them on like bathrobes. At first the fur was so cool and shivery it made the hairs on Lenny's arms stand up, but it warmed and was so soft she had to rub herself against it.

The groping figure whom Lenny sees in the kitchen “sucking her [mother's] neck, like a vampire” turns out to be the father of Alma's friend Delia Campbell—a man who, parched by his own marriage and shamed by his adultery, kills himself by driving off a bridge. Months later at camp, haunted by the memory of seeing his corpse in its casket, Alma lies on a cot in the dissipating heat of evening, trying to blot out the image of this man who had loved her mother, his cold skin dusted with rouge as he lay in his coffin like “a long stone doll with paints on its face.”

These are the kinds of damaging and irrepressible memories of which Shelter, is composed. The girls spend their nights whispering them aloud in a sort of exorcism-chant, as if searching for “a way to make things that had really happened seem as though they never had.” Seeing their parents' past as a premonitory glimpse of their own future, they try to talk it away. For all of them—Lenny, Cap, Alma, Delia—camp is a chance to screen out the hints of adult anguish that have come filtering through to them in daily life at home. Camp is an exquisite relief—“like being asleep, like a long, long dream. … Time was big here and Alma wanted oceans of it, more and more, so that her past seemed a smaller and smaller island barely discernible as the sailor looks back from the sea.”

As Phillips closes in on the inner lives of these children whose bodies are ripening, she reduces the public world of outward events to a dispensable frame—a decision that gives Shelter a different scale and proportion from that of her sprawling first novel, Machine Dreams (1984). Stretching over decades, Machine Dreams was an expansive book in which multiple perspectives were used to follow a small-town family from the Depression to the Vietnam War. Shelter is a tighter, smaller book, limited to a few voices and a few days; but what it loses in scope, it gains in intensity.

The date of the action—it is summer, 1963—may be inferred from a remark made by the camp directress, Mrs. Thompson-Warner (“you may remember just last fall, when Castro and the Russians were ready to attack us”), in one of the current-events classes that she requires of her girls. As “regional secretary of the Daughters of the American Revolution,” she rants about Khrushchev (that “short, fat, bald man with a swollen hairless face”), calling him “Lucifer in the flesh” and “Beelzebub.” Insisting that “people have to be educated to recognize evil,” she seems to have learned her pedagogical technique—chiefly innuendo—from the likes of Joe McCarthy: “The furnace of the Russian embassy,” she darkly hints, “burns at temperatures hot enough to cremate human bones. …” Despite her efforts to alert them to the world emergency into which they have been born (“Mrs. Thompson-Warner told them numerous stories and facts about Communism; Alma jotted down details that seemed related”), the girls are unmoved. They exist out of time, in a kind of aphrodisiac rain forest where they ramble through “the tall grass flying, [with its] wet, cut smell” and breathe “the warm loamy smell of something old, folded in for eons” arising from the fecund earth.

But if Shelter is an exceptionally sensual book, it is also a study of how sexual need can become coercive and violently destructive. Such is the nature of desire in the fallen world just outside the perimeter of the girls' Eden—where a desperate alcoholic named Carmody shares a shack with his wife and her 8-year-old son, Buddy. Each morning, when she trudges to camp to cook for the girls, he forces Buddy to run ice cubes over his nipples and croon to him “like a girl” while he strokes himself to orgasm. Carmody is a creature of prison, where he was sexually abused and from where he emerges as a half-whimpering, half-snarling brute. He is something of a gothic cliché—evil incarnate—sniffing out the possibilities like an animal awakened by the scent of prey. Phillips builds suspense by teasing us with the horrific possibility that he will get within range of the girls.

While Carmody paces and circles, another ex-con intervenes—an itinerant religious fanatic known only as Parson, who knew Carmody in prison and has become obsessed with him as “a pit the devil had filled.” Having come a long way in search of him, Parson takes a job with the local road crew and sticks close. Like Mrs. Townsend-Warner, he speaks fluently about the devil: Having known it, he spoke of smelling its approach and described the smell, he spoke of the Devil's fragrant oils and the swollen itch of the Devil's hunger, of stanching the flow of the Devil's bloody need, for that need was a mortal wound at the ravaged breast of Jesus, who took no woman and no man and was loved by God. Parson smells evil especially in the spillages of the body—in menstrual flow, in semen—and believes that he “must spill his seed on barren ground, never in the house or in his bed, seduced by pleasure, he must cleanse himself kneeling alone where the earth was hard, or in the cold of the river.” At first he is weirdly compelling in his compulsive need to purify himself, but after a while he starts to sound like a hillbilly cousin of Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, the lunatic general who is obsessed with his bodily fluids.

As these emblematic characters line up along a spectrum of fixed moral meanings, one hears the creaking of allegorical machinery. Carmody is the slithering serpent. Mrs. Townsend-Warner (who sees evil exclusively as an external threat) is prudish self-righteousness. Parson is the embodiment of guilt. Wandering through the woods with a none-too-subtle symbol in his hand (“the snake he held was like a long muscle, its flat head hidden in his fist, its tongue flicking out through his fingers …”), he is obsessed with his own pollution, and feels “most free when he had seen the Devil in some vulnerable guise and subdued him.” His pursuit of Carmody is an act of self-mortification. But it is not quite clear whether he will overcome his own rising desire as he spies the girls swimming, their “breasts … like white apples … not the large breasts men slept in, but breasts men mouthed and tasted, nearly tore with their teeth.”

“I wanted to think about evil,” Phillips has explained about her methods and motives in Shelter, “about whether evil really exists or if it is just a function of damage, the fact that when people are damaged, they damage others.” The trouble with this theory as it works itself out in the novel is that Carmody and Parson are not so much fully conceived persons as they are ambulatory symbols, representations of wounded males who turn savage. It is as if they have wandered in from a Flannery O'Connor story. As exemplars of the “damage” theory of evil—a favorite platitude in our culture—they are not sufficiently compelling.

The other problem with the theory of “damage” is that everyone in Shelter has been hurt in one way or another (Lenny harbors half-conscious memories of her father touching her belly and thighs; Delia sleepwalks as she tries to cope with memories of her father's death), and Phillips is too good a writer to commit herself to any formula by which the consequences of childhood pain can be calculated. How is one to explain why one suffering child grows up demented, reviling the world, while another lives to love and save the innocent? How is one to explain why some people see evil only outside themselves, while others sense it welling up as the “frantic … focus” of their own sexuality—as a kind of carnal solipsism?

In the end, Phillips's novel listens to its own contradictions, and declines to solve its own riddles. As theology, it runs the risk of offering a facile response to the problem of evil; but as fiction it has the tact to refrain from answers while persuading its readers of the mystery of the question.