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Title: love/hate
Review: I love and hate these stories, but mostly..I hate them. Maybe "hate" is putting too fine a point on it. I know Raymond Carver's wife gushed that "Black Tickets" was the "unmistakable work of early genius" but she and I must have read different books. These stories are, for the most point, pretentious and awkward. Come on--"the snowy Bible hums?" "Her breasts balloon, the sky opens inside them?" What the hell does that mean? I can't even visualize it. Kudos to Phillips for experimentation, but it doesn't work. I have to say that I do like "Lechery" and evidently so do many others, because it is heavily anthologized. "Black Tickets" is also compelling: bleak, black worlds these. Yet in the end these stories feel thin and undeveloped: abstractions rather than gritty experience.
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