A World of Their Own

Article # :	12367
Section :	BOOK WORLD
Issue Date :	11 / 1994	2,119 Words
Author :	Edward Hower Edward Hower's eight books include his latest novel, A Garden of Demons, and The Pomegranate Princess, a volume of folktales he collected while on Fulbright grants in India. He has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Epoch, Smithsonian, and other publications. He teaches in the writing department at Ithaca College.
SHELTER        Jayne Anne Phillips        New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994        279 pp., $21.95                Jayne Anne Phillips' harsh fictional worlds often bring out the worst and best in the people who live in them. Some are doomed, while others are sustained by their compassion.                In Black Tickets (1979), the acclaimed collection of stories that started her career, many of her characters destroyed themselves with drugs, alcohol, or madness. But others managed to care about each other despite their desperate circumstances, to make the human connections that allowed them to survive. Her next book of stories, Fast Lanes, presented a cast of burnt-out hippies, frantic drifters, and hopeless would-be rock musicians. Often they couldn't save themselves, but Phillips redeemed them with her ability to enter their ravaged lives and present them sympathetically. Her first novel, Machine Dreams, featured a somewhat friendlier landscape in which the family, formerly a place to escape from, became a refuge.                In Phillips' powerful new novel, Shelter, the place of refuge is a summer camp in the Appalachian mountains. The setting is both warmer and bleaker than those in her previous works. The warmth comes from the bonding that sustains its main characters, four young girls from nearby towns in West Virginia who grow up fast during a fateful summer in 1963. The bleakness is felt in family memories that haunt the girls as they try to deal with the emotional burdens their parents have imposed on them. It also comes from the local ... Read Full Article