The Review of Contemporary Fiction

News about People You Know, by Robert Phillips
reviewed by Nicholas Birns

Robert Phillips. News about People You Know. Texas Review Press, 2002. 175 pp. Paper: $18.95.

“News about people we know”: to illuminate the already exposed. To shed light upon areas where there is no mystery is a far more imposing task than merely shedding light upon mystery. In Phillips’s twice-told realism, no single word is innocent; there is the possibility with each one that it is freighted with meaning. Phillips’s prose is utterly colloquial, contemporary, so you could step into it off the street, yet obeys the Keatsian injunction to load every rift with ore. An editor asked to cut even a few words from one of the stories in this book would be faced with a near-impossible task, as all but a few are essential. Referential in manner, but not so in shape, these stories veer between urban, rural, and European settings, using human relationships as glyphs. Some stories are set on the Delmarva Peninsula, a terrain Phillips wrestles, albeit only temporarily, away from John Barth. A man named Fallick (we are supposed to laugh not just at the pun itself but its conscious obviousness) is the raisonneur of several of the stories, chronicling couplings and betrayals, “visions and revisions” in the Eliotic sense. “Smokey Mary’s,” the High Anglican church of St. Mary the Virgin around Times Square, emerges as the strangely moving spiritual center of one of the stories—only to be followed up by Marilyn Monroe serving the same function in the next, in a kind of religious anticlimax. Phillips’s narratives are antishort stories, yielding not epiphanies but discontinuous promptings. The imperative of Phillips’s prose is to let narrative unfold, not seal it off—to let it be narrative: garrulous, indefatigable, unstinted by formal or doctrinal restraints.