Jayne Anne Phillips is concerned with the way social reality impinges upon consciousness. As a result, most of her characters are brittle and emotionally unstable, the products of their confused world. In "El Paso," a long story told from several points of view, one character says that the sky "opens up like a hole"; such an image of vertigo is characteristic. Her characters are always faced with loss: sometimes a loss of place brought about by betrayal or neglect, sometimes the loss of a loved one to cancer or madness. The literature of bereavement, of the outsider and of madness is often the literature of extremity. Often enough, however, a character loses innocence and, with it, her sense of reality as a childhood world dissolves into the experience of illness, death, and separation.

In "The Heavenly Animal," a young woman allows her divorced father to hose off her...