“A Window on the Underworld,” in Women's Review of Books, Vol. XII, No. 7, April, 1995, p. 5.

[In the following review, Larson discusses the characterization and themes of Phillips's Shelter.]

Machine Dreams, Jayne Anne Phillips' first novel, was one of those books that changed my life. The coming-of-age story of a rural West Virginia girl named Danner, the narrative is interwoven with the stories of Danner's parents and of her brother, who is killed in Vietnam. Perhaps the book struck such a chord in me because I read it at a time when I was just beginning to realize how much the unresolved conflicts of my parents' lives carried over into my own. Or maybe it was Phillips' style: she jumped from first to third person, shifted between the perspectives of the different characters, told much of the story through letters, all with an assurance that took your breath away—especially for a first-time novelist. It could have been her voice: intimate, intelligent and oddly familiar. The immediacy and complexity of the lives Phillips portrayed, the originality and depth of her voice combined to stunning effect. Machine Dreams portrays the dissolution of a family and the beginning of the disillusionment of our country. Published in 1984, it ends on an ominous note during the Vietnam era, poised at the end of our innocence as a nation, at the dawn of our present age.

As soon as I finished Machine Dreams, I read Black Tickets, Phillips' first volume of short stories, published in 1975. When Fast Lanes, her second volume of stories, came out in 1987, I read that too. As with Machine Dreams, the focus of most of Phillips' stories is narrow, the tone is quiet, the subjects are everyday and the action unremarkable. The narrative is riveted firmly in place by Phillips' assiduous attention to detail, by the incisiveness of her description and by her ability to realize a scene fully and on many levels at once—all plainly and directly, with seemingly little effort, as in this passage from “El Paso”:

Sluggish trains changed cars in the hard-baked yard. Beside her on the shingled heat, I smelled her salt skin and she laughed, pulled my face to her throat. We rolled, hot shingles pressed to my back, and later the shower was cold. We drank iced whiskey in jelly glasses and she danced up the hall dripping, throwing water off her hair.

(Black Tickets, p. 87)

The sensuality of the passage is startling. The shingled heat, the sluggish trains, the hard-baked yard evoke the oppressiveness of the poverty in which the characters are living, the drudgery of their jobs and the squalor of their surroundings, as well as the suffocating aspects of their passion for each other. In contrast, the iced whiskey, the cold shower, the water dripping from the woman's body offer such an image of refreshment, of rejuvenation, that we understand why the man returns to her again and again.

In these stories and Phillips' first novel, the action unfolds very much in the visible world. Yet something moves beneath the surface, a motivating force that is inexplicit, unseen, buried. Its presence is discernible only as a shape around which characters move: it is the unnamed force that causes them to leave home, quit jobs, stay drunk, keep moving, drive fast, or watch too much TV. It's a sadness or anxiety or fear that exists as a precondition of the story, part of the characters' makeup, something that happened before the narration opens. Characters experience this condition as an inarticulate feeling, like the first-person narrator of the title story in Fast Lanes who says, “Sometimes it's hard to breathe, like living under blankets. … Hot, but cold too. Shaking.”

This world beneath the known, visible world is sometimes invoked explicitly, as in the story “Rayme,” from Fast Lanes:

All of us were consulting a series of maps bearing no relation to any physical geography, and Rayme was like a telephone to another world. Her messages were syllables from an investigative dream, and her every movement was precise, like those of a driver unerringly steering an automobile by watching the road through the rear-view mirror.

(p. 29)

This shadow beneath the action is usually experienced only as feelings and urges—as panics or depressions, the sensation of being lost, the compulsion for movement or sex or oblivion. Generally it is confined to the edges of the story, rarely glimpsed, bleeding through only in the thin places. But with Shelter Phillips enters a whole new realm. She plunges below the surface action, “breaking through” to this other world, which moves from the edges of the story to the very center.

It is a world of violence, primal desire, of evil, transcendence, memory and hunger. It is the world before and after our brief flash of conscious life. By bringing to life this “other side,” by attempting to articulate what has previously only been hinted at, Phillips adds a depth and resonance to the surface action of Shelter that was not as apparent in her other work. The leviathan that has been lurking in the depths suddenly leaps, breaking the surface, exposing its immensity.

Phillips sets the action of her novel at Camp Shelter, a Girl Guides camp in rural Appalachia. Here the natural world acts as a bridge to the world beneath the world: the air palpitates with spirits, the darkness is alive, water is a window to a subterranean realm and the trees, rocks and wind have a voice and memory of their own. Away from their families and the routines and preoccupations of home and town life—the fragile barrier of civilization—the characters begin to catch glimpses of this other world. Memories stir, sexuality kindles, dreams flourish. Without parental authority and protection, things that wouldn't normally happen, do.

The core characters are a pair of adolescent girls, Lenny and Cap, who are best friends, and Lenny's younger sister Alma and her best friend, Delia. The narrative reaches back into the girls' past, into the intertwined lives of their families. Alma has witnessed her mother's affair with Delia's father; in the quiet of Camp Shelter she works and reworks this secret in her mind, mulling over her sense of betrayal and trying to make sense of the lingering impression of her mother's unhappiness. The two older girls are on the threshold of sexual awakening. Their sexual curiosity is the catalyst for much of the plot.

These four girls could have stepped from the pages of Phillips' previous work. Like Danner from Machine Dreams, Lenny and Alma are the children of a troubled marriage, living in a small town in West Virginia. Their thoughts and preoccupations are similar, their inner narrative sounds much the same. But with eight-year-old Buddy Carmody and the evangelist ex-con called Parson, Phillips brings to life a type of character she has never created before and takes her work to another level. These two give the novel its force; they bring to it an atmosphere of spiritual turmoil and apocalyptic urgency.

Buddy is the son of Hilda, the camp cook, a woman of massive and imposing physical presence who is a memorable character in her own right. The power of her body and the goodness of her personality and her love for Buddy are so strong that she emanates a force field of comfort, safety and order, one that—unfortunately for Buddy—extends only a few yards from her person.

Outside it, the world is a dangerous place. Survival is dependent on a combination of animal cunning, strict adherence to a system of ritualized behavior, magic spells and protective amulets, and a state of constant watchfulness.

The great danger is from Buddy's stepfather, Carmody. Released from prison, he returns to terrorize Buddy and Hilda. Sadistic and lascivious, the product of a childhood of violence and cruelty, Carmody is an incarnation of evil: “What was in him roared like a cyclone, a hurricane; it was the sound that ate Carmody and turned him loose. … What raged inside him was a thing, a possession.” Buddy is Carmody's prey; while his mother works at the camp during the day, Buddy must use everything in his power to evade Carmody's menace. He lives by his wits, on the edge of survival, in constant fear. The forest is his sanctuary; he is one of its creatures.

The climactic scene of the novel comes when Carmody unleashes his fury, his lust, on Lenny. Buddy and the four girls' response to this violence brings about the resolution of the story, is at the heart of the transformation of their lives. This exposure to the evil that exists both within and without, that no adult can protect them from, and the knowledge that beneath the life of home and family this other world exists—always threatening to break through—is the loss of innocence the children experience. “The world would not be as it was,” Lenny thinks. “She saw that there was no world but this one now, full blown and dense with shifting air; they were born into it, mourning.”

The crowning achievement of Shelter is Phillips' creation of Parson, an orphan, ex-con and evangelical preacher who is in constant communication with the world of spirits and demons, who could just as easily be a mass murderer or an angel. Parson's fundamentalism is the only language big enough to address the powers of the unknown that torment him; his incantations are a way of keeping those spirits at bay. The forces of evil are alive to him, palpable in the material world:

Now Parson could hear the Devil walk near the shack at night, stalking spirits in the vaporous air. The devil made a scrunching sound in the grasses and leaves and loose dirt, a sound like a creature with tiny feet, and there was the airy, slick whish of the Devil's probing tongue, tasting and wanting, just on the other side of the thin board wall.

(p. 11)

Parson's cellmate was Carmody; his destiny is to follow him, to play his part in the drama that unfolds. He comes to the camp as a laborer; he lives in a chicken coop near Turtle Hole, the spiritual center of the book, the “eye” to the world below. Lenny is sexually drawn to him; he and Buddy are linked, both spiritually and materially, for Parson acts as Buddy's protector from Carmody. He is both menacing and pure; this ambiguity is part of what gives him such stature as a character.

Some hint of Faulkner permeates the book. Carmody and Popeye; Shelter and Sanctuary; with the dark complexion that always marks him as Other, his abandonment as an infant by his mother and childhood abuse by a fire-and-brimstone foster-father, Parson is the literary descendent of Light in August's Joe Christmas. In the snatches of past dimly remembered, in Parson's return, again and again, to images whose meaning—as it becomes clearer—illuminates the novel as a whole, there is the same kind of method, a widening of the narrative in concentric circles to envelope more and more, to move the story forward in a line that spirals, doubling over on itself. (Phillips used this technique in Machine Dreams, handing off the narrative from character to character, retelling the same scene from different perspectives.) This slow unfolding is especially powerful in the pivotal scene, where the reader has the sensation of watching the cataclysm take place in a series of slow-motion instant replays, each photographed from a different angle.

“It's strange what you don't forget,” Machine Dreams begins. The epilogue of that novel, whose last image is of two children disappearing into the forest, sounds the beginning notes of Shelter. What we don't forget, what we struggle to remember, what we strain to hear in the brief silences that occur when ordinary life is momentarily suspended, are the forces that drive our lives and power our emotions. Shelter: the title is both straightforward and ironic. What's out there? Phillips asks. Where and what is our protection?