Southern Gothic, '90s Style

By R.Z. Sheppard

Jayne Anne Phillips has built her career the old-fashioned way. First the short stories that announced there was a new voice in town. Then the novel, Machine Dreams, that amplified that voice in a sustained narrative. Most critics approved. Phillips' profuse style was well timed to counter the minimalism of the Raymond Carver school of fine word whittling.

In Shelter (Houghton Mifflin; 279 pages; $21.95), Phillips continues to ladle on the prose: "In the splintering pour of the storm there is such a silence, like a church or a cell, a cloister, empty, and rain courses down the broken glass of the block-paned windows. Some of the jagged glass juts up like tongues, other panes are shattered intact, jeweled in their frames in webbed configurations." You know -- it was raining.

Set in a West Virginia girls' camp during the summer of 1963, the author's second novel is about the loss of childhood innocence and, by occasional inference, about a nation that is on the verge of misplacing its own carefree illusions. It could be argued that 1963 marked the true end of the 1950s. While Phillips' campers frolic, the U.S., having ignored Eisenhower's departing warning about fighting a land war in Asia, is getting pushy in Vietnam; rock 'n' roll is beginning to convert youthful masses to the worship of the free libido; and Lee Harvey Oswald is ordering his rifle by mail.

The atmosphere, then, is properly ominous at Camp Shelter, where Delia, Catherine and sisters Lenny and Alma explore a wilderness that mirrors their own sexual stirrings and confusion. The woods are dark, deep and haunted by both Christian and pagan spirits. A character named Parson flits in and out of Phillips' story as a sort of Fundamentalist avenger. Nature comes guileless in the person of Buddy, a knowing child of the forest, and Nature comes sinister in the form of Buddy's father Carmody, a backwoods pervert who would not have been out of place in James Dickey's Deliverance.

Camp Shelter is an ironically named and carefully set stage, away from the everyday world. Phillips' young women not only confront the dangers hidden behind trees and lurking in deep pools, but they also must grapple with complex family lives that are ever present in the narrative. In Phillips' depictions of both city and country life, evil is something children are pushed into by corrupt adults. Buddy's physical humiliation at the hands of his father is compared to the emotional bruises that divorce and neglect inflict on the campers.

| The theme of psychological and sexual child abuse should provide Shelter with a hot selling point. The violent and fanciful conclusion, in which the children carry out feral justice, should satisfy current assumptions about victimization and empowerment. There are high literary expectations for Phillips, but Shelter -- overwritten and trendy, an example of Southern gothic, 1990s style -- does not justify them.