The themes of individual isolation and reality/illusion are ancient and almost universal. Modern precedents include the fiction of Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, whose technique of the interior monologue may have influenced the story "Bluegill." Similar emphasis upon the question of illusion is seen in the novels of John Barth and John Irving and in the plays of Edward Albee and Eugene lonesco. Phillips's portraits of the disintegrating family find parallels in the work of Gail Godwin, Anne Tyler, and Bobbie Ann Mason.

In technique Fast Lanes is in the tradition of Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, and Sherwood Anderson.

The lyrical quality of Phillips's prose is reminiscent of Wolfe's prose poems in Look Homeward, Angel (1929), and the themes of family failure and individual alienation are equally typical of Wolfe.

Like Faulkner and Anderson, Phillips has assembled a collection of...