Customer Reviews

Shelter: A Novel

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This searing, sometimes gothic coming-of-age story is written in luminous prose. No surprise here, for Jayne Anne Phillips has done it before in "Machine Dreams," a novel nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Lenny and her younger sister, Alma, are spending the summer at Camp Shelter, a West Virginia Girl Guides retreat. However, rather than spending their days swimming, hiking, and singing around campfires, they undergo an astonishing rite of passage.

Their idyll is interrupted by Carmody, a drunken ex-convict who abuses his young son, Buddy, and another ex-convict, Parson, a sick soul given to delusional religious visions. Through the collision of these antithetical characters, the author explores the existence of good and evil, family relationships, and generational differences.

Jayne Anne Phillips often wields a poet's pen, endowing her prose with a richness of observation and crystalline clarity of words. "Shelter" is a unique literary coup.

- Gail Cooke

For devotees of Phillips' writing style, this is a must-have item. This work, more than any others truly exemplifies her rather unique way with words. No other living author could render such a poetic description of urinals; it is, alas, simply too beautiful to describe. This wonderful book is less about plot and characterization than about the pure joy of indulging oneself in Phillips' marvelously arcane prose. Happily, for the devoted fan, there are quite a few copies on the market, although why anyone would even think of discarding such a marvelous work of art is a complete mystery to me. This is a truly unique author at her very best. Excelsior!

I found this book to be extremely confusing. I stuck it out and after finishing it I decided I really did not like it. I feel as though I was reading two entirely different books - one that was a supernatural Stephen Kingesque novel and one that was a coming of age chiller/thriller novel. Frankly I didn't "get" all the Parson character/Devil stuff. I agree with other customer's criticism that the characters were extremely underdeveloped - I was half way though the book and still flipping to the front to figure out who was whom. I can hardly wait to see who in my book club got through it and what they thought of it.

Phillips' words probe the uncharted depths of young-seeming souls with remarkable honesty, almost with a gentle clinical attitude. Few modern authors I know of have the ability to express what happens when friendship turns to interdependence, when fear dismisses all reasoning. How can anyone describe what a young child feels when he sees and hears things beyond his understanding? Phillips effectively feels out the emotion in her characters, and turns what could be hokey or mildly interesting subject matter into a beautiful work of literature. This novel has the effect of suddenly walking into a watery patch of shadow on a hot summer's day, and all at once feeling the hairs rise on your bare arms. It draws the dark depths of a wholesome summer camp up to the light and creates more dark power than yet another "gothic" novel about vampires or curses spanning a millenium.
_Shelter_ requires more than one read to absorb all its dark beauty and the incredibly powerful,poetic language the author uses. One tends to read quickly the first time, to discover the plot as it unfolds through brief vignettes given through the eyes of the various characters. Phillips is a wonderful writer with an unbelievable genius for observation and sensitivity.

This is one of my most favorite books. Phillips is brilliant with language and tone, in the tradition of such Southern authors as Faulkner and Styron. She really makes you feel hot and sweaty as she describes the summer in West Virginia, and she does a wonderful job at placing you inside the minds of these children, all who are hurt and disturbed to varying degrees, but still ultimately triumph over evil.

I love books such as this one who tell a good story but in a non-linear way, and give you credit for having a brain to figure things out that are implied rather than thrown at you. If you want that you can read King or Grisham, but I'll take Jayne Anne any day.

Richard Ford's novel Independence Day seems to careen at a frantic pace when compared to Ms. Phillips tale of several girls at a summer camp. JAP has tremendous talent, but I tired of her Faulknerian sentences combined with strange grammar. Sample: "Alma playing paper dolls, not sleeping at all, yelling for Kool-Aid, how things seal off for a while behind the pair of them, the two girls." Ms. Phillips also has to describe everything in complete detail. Entering a men's rest room we find that "the urinals were a long-necked row of cracked porcelain forms, laced with shadow, supplicant, open-mouthed."

I did find the story interesting; I admired a lot of the writing. Yet I continually worried that the novel would come to a complete halt, and that no existing literary connector cables would be able to jump start it again.

Did Phillips even know what she wanted to write about when she started this book? She sets up an interesting situation and then proceeds to waste time with verbal gymnastics. What little plot there is is completely disjointed and moves at a snail's pace. There is no connection, no growth, no logic between the opening and closing of the novel. Furthermore, the characters are flat, unbelievable, and rather dull. Phillips introduces themes of violence, religion, sexuality, and family and never develops or connects a single one of them. At the close of the book the reader is confused, not because of the depth or range of Phillips' writing, but because the author herself was clearly confused as she wrote it.

_Shelter_ by Jayne Anne Phillips, is an extremely well written
novel but I can't say I completely understood it. There is
so much to this novel that it is difficult to take it all in
after only one reading. For example, symbolism abounds but
I'm not clear what is being symbolized. "Shelter" is a girls
summer camp in sweltering hot West Virginia in July, 1963.
But instead of being a 'shelter' the charcters, mostly children,
actually lose their innocence in an unusual rite of passage.
They make a choice as to how they will deal with a killing of
another human being but they keep it to themselves, never
trusting the adults. There were so many ideas that left me
with an inquiry instead of an insight. Why didn't they tell
the adults? What did the ancient writing on the walls of
the cave mean? How did Parsons fit in? A good book but
I'm still puzzling over it.

After having tried on three separate occasions to work my way through this book, I am left with one question: how many trees were sacrificed to satisfy the author's need to spew self-titillating and turgid offal? In the words of Voltaire, "Ecrasez l'infame!"

This book is amazing, Philips's words ring like poetry and the variety of her vocabulary and structure when she writes from the different characters' point of view is stunning. Once you get to know the people in the book, you don't even have to read the title of the chapter to know who is talking. She writes from the perspective of Lenny and Alma, two sisters at camp, Buddy, a small boy who follows them around, and Parson who lives in a shack near the camp. Throughout the story they are beautifully linked together. I would highly recommend this book!