Jayne Anne Phillips has built her career the old-fashioned way. First the short stories that announced there was a new voice in town. Then the novel, Machine Dreams, that amplified that voice in a sustained narrative. Most critics approved. Phillips' profuse style was well timed to counter the minimalism of the Raymond Carver school of fine word whittling.
In Shelter (Houghton Mifflin; 279 pages; $21.95), Phillips continues to ladle on the prose: "In the splintering pour of the storm there is such a silence, like a church or a cell, a cloister, empty, and rain courses down the broken glass of...
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