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Fast Lanes

Jayne Anne Phillips

3.94 · Rating details · 188 ratings · 13 reviews

Jayne Anne Phillips has always been a master of portraiture, both in her widely acclaimed novels and in her short fiction. The stories in Fast Lanes demonstrated the breadth of her talent in a tour de force of voices, offering elegantly rendered views into the lives of characters torn between the liberation of detachment and the desire to connect.

Three stories are collect ...more

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Paperback, 208 pages

Published May 9th 2000 by Vintage (first published 1984)

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· 188 ratings · 13 reviews

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Jan 29, 2009 Metaxy99 rated it it was amazing

I find the most fascinating figure of this collection to be a small blue bird egg, delicately painted in gold Chinese characters. It is set in the center of a mandala - radiating steak tags and framed by white pebbles - that is arranged over raw meat at a Bonanza steakhouse. The characters etched on the egg translate as "banquet."

Fast Lanes takes the themes of fragmentation, desparation, and yearning that manifests in shapes of sex or violence or truncated transcendence and gives them a kind of I find the most fascinating figure of this collection to be a small blue bird egg, delicately painted in gold Chinese characters. It is set in the center of a mandala - radiating steak tags and framed by white pebbles - that is arranged over raw meat at a Bonanza steakhouse. The characters etched on the egg translate as "banquet."

Fast Lanes takes the themes of fragmentation, desparation, and yearning that manifests in shapes of sex or violence or truncated transcendence and gives them a kind of delicate and exotic figuration: derringer pistols, rings inlaid with pearl, dancers reading Zola, a hundred high school girls moving lighted candles in a choreographed routine. The language too, tends to the achingly delicate and exotic, as in:

She fingers absently a spray of forsythia arched from a vase by the bed. It is the waxy deep yellow of butter melted to a puddle and then frozen. He feels it is violent.

or, better, what i take to be one of the highlights of all fast lanes:

Hello my little bluegill, little shark face. Fanged one, sucker, hermaphrodite. Rose, bloom in the fog of the body; see how the gulls arch over us, singing their raucous squalls. They bring you sweetmeats, tiny mice, spiders with clasped legs. In their old claws, claws of eons, reptilian sleep, they cradle shiny rocks and bits of glass. Boat in my blood, I dream you furred and sharp toothed, loping in snow mist on a tundra far from the sea...

Rayme, the story of a strange, dislocated girl who floats with the community housing set of the narrator's student days, is my favorite here. It is some of the very best of Phillips' mix of odd and poignant and painful and beautiful, that kind of "dream in jagged pieces." Rayme, so far gone yet so endearing, is the one who arranged the mandala, painted the perfect blue egg with gold Chinese characters. She was celebrating the feast, but Bonanza steakhouses don't much take to rituals of gratitude and spiritual connection.

Once she cooked soup. For an hour, she stood by the stove, stirring the soup in a large dented kettle. I looked into the pot and saw a jagged object floating among the vegetables. I pulled it out, holding the hot, thin edge; it was a large fragment of blackened linoleum from the buckling kitchen floor.
I asked Rayme how a piece of floor got in the soup.
"I put it there," Rayme said.
I didn't answer.
"It's clean," Rayme said. "I washed it first," and then, angrily, "if you're not going to eat my food, don't look at it."

That was her worst summer. She told me she didn't want to take the Thorazine because it made her into someone else. Men were the sky and women were the earth; she liked books about Indians. She said cats were good and dogs were bad; she hated the lower half of her body. She didn't have lovers but quietly adored men from her past - relatives, boyfriends, men she saw in magazines or on the street. Her high school boyfriend was Krishna, a later one Jesus, her father "Buddha with a black heart." She built an altar in her room out of planks and cement blocks, burned candles and incense, arranged pine needles and pebbles in patterns. She changed costumes often and moved the furniture in her room several times a day, usually shifting it just a few inches. She taped pictures on her wall: blue Krishna riding his white pony, Shiva dancing with all her gold arms adorned, Lyndon Johnson in a glossy cover from Newsweek , cutouts of kittens from a toilet paper advertisement.

...more

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Feb 12, 2009 SmarterLilac rated it really liked it

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Apr 20, 2016 Ryan Juno rated it really liked it

Loved the short story Fast Lanes. Not everything was amazing in here, but worth it--SO WORTH IT--to read.

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Nov 13, 2018 Agneta rated it really liked it

Födelsedagspresent från Helène Nilsson på min 24-års dag!

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Nov 28, 2009 Kathleen Guler rated it liked it

Shelves: books-i-own, literary-fiction

This is a collection of short stories. Most of them are rather relentless in their dark cast of despairing humans. While the writing is spot on in capturing this, I would have liked to see just a little glimmer of hope or humor, even sardonically, just to relieve the darkness a bit. The last story, "Bess" is my favorite of these as it gives a fuller portrayal of the two main characters, a brother and sister, Bess and Warwick. ...more

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Nov 28, 2010 Jasmina is currently reading it

Jayne Anne Phillips has an incredible way with words and describing the concept of 'dislocation' with an understanding.The short stories work with one another to create the full picture of an American wanderer.If you are looking for a book about 'belonging to an American society', then this is the one you should turn to. ...more

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Feb 09, 2008 Anne Sanow rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Hypnotically good prose in these seven stories. The Vietnam-era coming-of-age story "Blue Moon" was expanded into her novel Machine Dreams, but this version (the longest story in the collection) is more engaging in its focus, I think. ...more

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Dec 09, 2016 Pam rated it it was ok

Short stories so it was a fast read. Only the last was very good.

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Dec 15, 2015 Robert rated it it was amazing

Wow--masterful writer. This are all early stories and I can only imagine she's gotten better. Makes me want to read all her short stories. ...more

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Sep 14, 2008 Felicia rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction, own

Challenging ...

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Mar 07, 2011 Hakeem added it

I think This Book Is Interesting Because I Learned Alot from This book & I would Like To Recommend This Book To My Friends.

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Feb 26, 2021 Timmy Cham rated it it was amazing

I greatly enjoyed the artistry in this 150-page collection of
the author's short stories. My favorites were "Blue Moon"
and the title story, "Fast Lanes." The portrayal of relationships
in these stories impressed me, as well as Phillips' great
talent for description.

I'll be re-reading this book, to see how Phillips accomplished
the magic she did. ...more

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About Jayne Anne Phillips

Jayne Anne Phillips

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Jayne Anne Phillips is an American novelist and short story writer. Phillips graduated from West Virginia University, earning a B.A. in 1974, and later graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Phillips has held teaching positions at several colleges and universities, including Harvard University, Williams College, and Boston University. She is currently Professor of Engl ...more