OGIC: Great expectations

Who remembers Jayne Anne Phillips? In high school, in the heyday of my fiction-writing ambitions, I became just possessed by her short stories in the collection Black Tickets. I could recite whole paragraphs of the stuff, which to my teenaged ear had at once a daring, quickening urgency and a quicksand sensuality that could bind you to a word at a time. The story that particularly impressed me was the title story, which starts: “Jamaica Delilah, how I want you; your smell a clean yeast, a high white yogurt of the soul.” This, I thought, was how I wanted to write. Go ahead, laugh. I can take it.
Times change, and so do teenagers. I haven’t thought about Jayne Anne Phillips in many years, but the bits of her prose I remember don’t sound at all like what I’d like to write, if I were still writing fiction; to my adult ear, after a long evolution of taste, they sound for the most part pretentious and a little silly. But I wasn’t alone in embracing them. A copy of Phillips’s later story collection, Fast Lanes, recently turned up in a used bookstore and I picked it up out of curiosity and nostalgia. Its jacket boasts some pretty heady praise for her previous books (Black Tickets and her novel Machine Dreams) from some pretty powerful literary arbiters.
Robert Stone said “Machine Dreams in its wisdom and its compassionate, utterly unsentimental rendering of the American condition will rank as one of the great books of this decade.” Our old friend Michiko Kakutani, writing when still a wunderkind, offered that the novel “will doubtless come to be seen as both a remarkable novelistic debut and an enduring literary achievement.” As for Black Tickets, it is called “the unmistakable work of early genius trying her range” (Tillie Olsen) and “unlike any [stories] in our literature” (Raymond Carver). Nadine Gordimer pronounced her “the best short-story writer since Eudora Welty.”
Now, I haven’t reread Phillips, and any of this may be true. And of course we all know that praise in blurbs and book reviews is chronically overinflated. But it’s striking how enormous the claims are in these plaudits, and how very little one hears Phillips discussed today, just a few decades later. She just doesn’t seem to be part of the conversation, though she must have influenced some of the writers we do talk about. Without the benefit of rereading her, which I may try to do when I finish the book I’m reading now (Rabbit, Run, if you want to know), it’s impossible to say whether she was simply a less prodigious talent than the critics and writers (some of them doubtless her teachers) thought they were beholding or whether Phillips’s timing was unlucky, her style soon outmoded as literary taste changed. Who’s to say that in another thirty years she won’t be rediscovered and newly embraced by a new generation of readers, a la Dawn Powell?
As it happens, JL has been considering similar stories in the visual arts over at Modern Kicks: “It’s a familiar enough story: an artist seemingly poised for fame finds the aesthetic winds changing and her formerly-lauded work out of favor,” he writes of the painter Sonia Gechtoff, reminding us that failures like hers and Phillips’s to fulfill the promise attached to them aren’t always really failures at all.