SOURCE: A review of Fast Lanes, in Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 19, 1987, pp. 3, 11.

In the following review, Eder praises the stories in Phillips's Fast Lanes.

Even though her ear for numb and displaced American voices is as sharp as that of any of her fellow writers, Jayne Anne Phillips does not, like the cooler practitioners, turn her stories entirely over to them.

She has a middle distance. She doesn't rule her characters, as in older styles of short-story writing. But she doesn't leave them by themselves, either.

The reader senses a listener as well as a voice. It is a listener who seeks the voice out; one who is interested in the characters, feelings, fates and souls of a wide variety of lives operating at all manner of temperatures. The listener is silent, maybe only implicit; but, as Strindberg and Beckett have shown, a speech to a...