Fast Lanes

The interstate isn't just a place to break the speed limit in West Virginia native Jayne Anne Phillips' short story collection, Fast Lanes. Held together by the theme of rootless living, Fast Lanes presents a set of restless drifters who make the interstate their home literally and figuratively, whether they're driving cross-country, living in the limbo of pregnancy, or waiting for that big break into rock-and-roll stardom. With impressionistic strokes and languid cadences, Phillips' renders her characters' perceptions into dreamy American landscapes. The reader is invited to enter into these sensory tableaux, to inhale the vapors of marijuana floating through a commune or feel the Texas heat filling a car. Yet while Phillips deftly represents what her characters perceive, she is less able to communicate what they feel. Just as her characters are unable to anchor themselves to any sense of contentedness or home, the stories of Fast Lanes fail to express any truly poignant emotional insights. "I pass everything anyway, so I might as well stay in the fast lane," says the narrator of the title story, and it's exactly this devil-may-care attitude that unfortunately engenders a similar indifference to the protagonists of Fast Lanes.