Loose Ends FAST LANES

By Pico Iyer

Home means no freedom; freedom means no home. That is the dilemma facing all the tumbledown souls who drift through the peeling Springsteen homes and long, open highways of Jayne Anne Phillips' fiction. Castoffs from the counterculture, sleeping on floors or living in cars, unsure of where they stand in time or space, few of them know how to keep jobs, let alone take care of themselves. Phillips' characters lack purpose and authority. Their world is fluid, but they do not quite go under. They simply float.

Following the intricate expansiveness of her much praised novel Machine Dreams, the gifted Phillips, 35, has here assembled a collection of loose ends: first-person monologues revolving around barefoot girls, post-hippie gypsies and other street-smart naifs. One story is a kelped and matted address delivered by a castaway young woman to the baby inside her; another, the erotically charged rural reminiscence of an old lady; a third, the juiced-up riff of a 20-year-old rock 'n' roller, strutting his stuff with the swagger of the vulnerable.

All seven of the tales in Fast Lanes, however, sort through the bric-a-brac of unmade lives: "It was September of 1974, most of us would leave town in a few weeks, and I had been recently pregnant. Some of us were going to Belize to survive an earthquake. Some of us were going to California . . . My lover, the carpenter, was going to Nicaragua on a house-building deal that would never materialize. We'd had passport photos taken together; he would use his passport in the company of someone else and I would lose mine somewhere in Arizona."

Characters here are joined more by circumstances than relationships, and circumstances themselves come to seem like relationships ("This time that was nearly over, these years, seemed as close to family as most of us would ever get"). Lovers are always too distant in these tales, and families usually too close. Generations are in every sense confused. One story finds a teenage girl drawn to one of her mother's high school friends; another has a restless middle-age woman mothered by her house-loving daughter. Sadder even than the abundance of casual pregnancies is the absence of parental models. Too old for her age, and too young, one high school girl reads Ingenue, Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle and the Bible alone at night in her room. Why the last? "Because I'm nervous, and it helps me sleep. All the trees and fruit, the figs, begat and begat going down like the multiplication tables."

Sometimes Phillips is almost willful in her virtuosity, and sometimes she is borne along too easily on waves of rhythmic prose. Nevertheless, her range is considerably greater than is common among her despair-addicted contemporaries, as is her fugitive grace. Where Ann Beattie's characters, for instance, are habitually on Valium, Phillips' are generally on speed; while Beattie's have surrendered to nothingness, Phillips' are still in search of something. Nearly all the stories in Fast Lanes are, like their characters, fascinated with gymnasts, tightrope walkers and others who find ways to steady and ground themselves. And the best of them achieve that same happy balance of passion and precision that one Phillips character imagines from an angelic piper, "formal as a harpsichord yet buoyant, wild."