Black Tickets

These stories encompass a range that is undeniable. Voices shift from young girls to young women mostly and occasionally to young men as in "El Paso." The narrative scope is tight and very intimately entwined. The landscape, family, and dynamics of character change constantly from story to story. These are gritty situations and people: displaced young women, strippers, a homeless madwoman, an orphaned child turned prostitute. These are bottom-feeder stories-- youth without the rosy glow of hope, lackluster in faith. But despite the harrowing void in Phillips' writing, truth can be found here. These stories are full of the monsters that tear us down and that we give ourselves to as well. The flash fiction in this collection is perhaps the most spectacular part of the book. They are quick portraits of girls and sometimes their families as in "Wedding Picture." Others take a more perilous turn as in "Under the Boardwalk," "Accidents," and "Slave." An overwhelming number of the stories are pocked with sexual deviation and marked with terror. There is something forceful about this exhumation of human depravity as if the author were excising skin and tissue and veins and clots just to show the reader the glimmer of a wet organ. Phillips' details are mostly spot-on and daring. In one passage she compares the texture of a woman's skin to a "seeded strawberry." Phillips also has tight control of her pacing. She often writes as if cutting into the last sentence, as if the slideshow quickens and the pictures begin to move like a small home movie. However, this is not an easy collection. At times, reading her feels as if a pleasurable spot on the body is being stroked too hard, rubbed too long perhaps by even the wrong person. This collection is original and the stories are frighteningly raw, sexually devious, and potent. She has a knack for honesty that is always bound to brutality. There are demons in these stories that perhaps will make us hope we had not woken.

I read this book the first time in 1979 when it was published. I had never read anything like it. The young characters were all from my generation, did the things I did, and took the risks I took. I was very moved by this book. The prose evoked the rather disoriented late 1970s perfectly.I went back and read "Black Tickets" again last summer and was pleasantly surprised to discover how evocative the book still is and how moving the language is. This book is a masterpiece.

This is potent, unblinking, and very courageous stuff. Very beautiful too.

The stories are of two types here -- short, one page sketches that verge on being prose poems, and longer, fuller stories which still contain an elusive quality. Although critics, to a man, preferred the longer stories, I find the shorter ones equally compelling. The writing is first-rate; it is nuanced, poetic, and contains a wealth of psychological insight. I think this is Phillps's greatest accomplishment: her merging of the psychological and the political in stories that are always accessible. Those looking for pretension will find it only with reviewers who trash sophisticated story-tellers while including the (see more about me) tag at the beginning of their own reviews.

These are staggeringly assured pieces and, as wonderful as her subsequent work has been, in some ways I don't think she's been able to top them. Marred only by an occasional tendency to use shocking subject matter for its own sake, these stories are punch-drunk on the precision and lush beauty of their own language. I don't think there is anyone currently writing in English whose prose is this gorgeous, or this gorgeously controlled. For me, she's like a female equivalent of Michael Ondaatje. Language to get lost in, but that never loses sight of the very human characters who use it, or whom it concerns.