[In the following review, Wiggins complains, “Unfortunately, in Fast Lanes, Phillips seems to have fallen victim to her own style.”]

All of the seven short stories in Jayne Anne Phillips's second collection, Fast Lanes, are told in the first-person singular—six of them by people who are variously described by their circumstances as girls or female adolescents, or young or old or middle-aged women, even though each sounds the same. “I had plans”, one of them says. “Maybe I was in training to become my mother, become that kind of … unfulfilled woman, vigilant and damaged.”

The character who says this is a teenager called Danner, but the way she speaks does not distinguish her from the old woman Bess, or the mother of Angela, or Kate, or any of the other narrators. Names, or their calculated absence, rather than words, distinguish characters in this collection. In one story, “Bluegill”, an unnamed mother addresses her unnamed, unborn child. In others, people crop up in modern West Virginia bearing the wildly improbable surnames Kato, Warwick, Shinner, Thurman, Barnes and Rayme. Of the latter, one of the indistinguishable female narrators says, “This story could be about any one of those people, but it is about Rayme and comes to no conclusions.”

Miss Phillips gives the reader no opinion, no commitment. People bleed, are bled, make love, go crazy under the influence of chemicals, in a state of numbness, painlessly. When, in the story “Blue Moon”, the book achieves its first and most violent moment, Phillips writes it thus:

When I came back she was standing in front of the mirror, the shower still running behind her. Someone had left a matte knife on the sink. Kato had the knife in her hand and she held one arm straight over her head. She watched herself in the mirror and traced a long ragged cut from her wrist to her armpit. She did it incredibly fast, with no expression, as though what she saw in the glass bore no connection to her.

Like her character Kato, Phillips is a brilliant technician, doing all that she intends with cool dispatch. Her writing glides sheer as a yacht which sails the horizon at a great distance. She watches her characters watching themselves, then sends their synopses to the reader.

Her first collection of stories, Black Tickets, and her novel, Machine Dreams, were both breathtaking examples of the heat that can generate under the minimalist's skin. Unfortunately, in Fast Lanes, Phillips seems to have fallen victim to her own style. She is best when she's writing about the near-distant, fugitive past—life in the great USA fifteen years ago. Vietnam, speed, drifters and dope are her best props. But the poses and postures of the people in Fast Lanes tend to read like yesterday's news: they are dated, but not dated enough.

Fast Lanes is apt as a title: Jayne Anne Phillips seems to be looking in a driving mirror at a vision of something she regrets she's overtaken. Like the people she writes about and the country she lives in, she's pulled out and passed her own history just for the thrill of forward momentum.