[In the following excerpt, Carter discusses Phillips's break from realistic fiction in her presentation of the Vietnam War in Machine Dreams.]

As the Vietnam War literary genre continued to evolve, writers of both genders have experimented with literary expression in search of the most representative interpretation possible for a war that still begs for definition, where absolutes appear to be missing and reality remains obscure. Of all literary expression, innovation offers the greatest freedom to explore such an elusive war in every conceivable direction. Although they are a minority, several women writers of the Vietnam War experience have broken with the tradition of realism predominant in women's war writings to express their impressions of the Vietnam War experience with more innovative variations in both form and content.

… Foremost among these writers is Jayne Anne Phillips, whose novel Machine Dreams spans two wars and represents an experimentation in form. Former Vietnam War nurse Elizabeth Ann Scarborough has written an essentially factual memoir of her war experience in The Healer's War, excepting part two of three in the novel, which is a flight of fantasy that contrasts sharply with the realism controlling most of the narrative. Karen Joy Fowler's short story “Letters From Home” is one woman's fantasy of the war experience from the perspectives of both an imaginary combat soldier and a civilian longing to know the truth of the experience. Ursula Le Guin depicts a recurrence of the Vietnam War on another planet in a future century in her science fiction novella “The Word for World is Forest.” Both Susan Casper in “Covenant With a Dragon” and Karen Joy Fowler in “The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things” have also chosen the science fiction genre to illustrate their short-story interpretations of the postwar readjustments of Vietnam War veterans. Kate Wilhelm uses speculative fiction to depict a reenactment of the My Lai Massacre on American soil in her short story “The Village.” Emily Prager experiments with postmodern satire in her bizarre short story “The Lincoln-Pruitt Anti-Rape Device,” offering a solution to the war as absurd as the war itself. Although their paths of deviation from the norm of realism may differ, all of these women offer individual interpretations of war entirely appropriate for a war as nebulous and incomprehensible as Vietnam.

Machine Dreams, an experimental novel in form, spans four decades and covers the history of an American family and the service of a father and son in World War II and Vietnam. The novel is a compendium of letters, journal entries, flashbacks, personal narratives, and flows of stream of consciousness, all given voice by four family members. The only real continuity in the novel comes from the dual motif of dreams and machines that loosely hold it together. Machine Dreams “captures the way the war seemed to shatter all the given values, rendering all the customary things unstable,” through a series of childhood images of dreams and machines that are fanciful and intriguing in youth, but acquire sinister proportions in the hands of adults who wield their power in a new form of lethal weaponry. Billy—the drifter, the pretender, the make-believe airplane pilot—becomes another MIA in Vietnam, shattering whatever continuity was left in the Hampson family's divided household. His sister, Danner, who continually relives their childhood fantasies in a desperate attempt to keep Billy's image alive, becomes an embittered, isolated victim of the war, unable to cope with the present because she is so emotionally burdened by the past. Danner, too, could be considered “missing in action” as she floats in a time warp of unreality in a futile search for the only close human tie left in her life, now only a phantom of her imaginative play. Critic Susan Wolf characterizes Machine Dreams as a “meditation on loss, the unresolvable loss of unfulfilled lives, of a family amputated by a loss that cannot be named.” The discontinuous narrative style of Machine Dreams is an innovative break with the continuity of most realistic fiction. In the novel, Phillips does not attempt to simulate reality, only to catch glimpses of it from four different perspectives—veteran and civilian—of a family suffering its own internal conflicts as well as those imposed by war. Instead of clear definitions, the novel offers blurred impressions. The sustained, hazy, dreamlike tone of magical but ominous fantasy gives readers the sensation of floating through the novel's lyrical prose. By interacting with the novel's four voices, readers give the narrative whatever realistic cohesiveness seems necessary. …