Word: shelterer
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...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 the block-paned windows. Some of the jagged glass juts up like tongues, other panes are shattered intact, jeweled in their frames in webbed configurations." You know -- it was raining...
...atmosphere, then, is properly ominous at Camp Shelter, where Delia, Catherine and sisters Lenny and Alma explore a wilderness that mirrors their own sexual stirrings and confusion. The woods are dark, deep and haunted by both Christian and pagan spirits. A character named Parson flits in and out of Phillips' story as a sort of Fundamentalist avenger. Nature comes guileless in the person of Buddy, a knowing child of the forest, and Nature comes sinister in the form of Buddy's father Carmody, a backwoods pervert who would not have been out of place in James Dickey's Deliverance...
...Camp Shelter is an ironically named and carefully set stage, away from the everyday world. Phillips' young women not only confront the dangers hidden behind trees and lurking in deep pools, but they also must grapple with complex family lives that are ever present in the narrative. In Phillips' depictions of both city and country life, evil is something children are pushed into by corrupt adults. Buddy's physical humiliation at the hands of his father is compared to the emotional bruises that divorce and neglect inflict on the campers...
...theme of psychological and sexual child abuse should provide Shelter with a hot selling point. The violent and fanciful conclusion, in which the children carry out feral justice, should satisfy current assumptions about victimization and empowerment. There are high literary expectations for Phillips, but Shelter -- overwritten and trendy, an example of Southern gothic, 1990s style -- does not justify them...
There are tiresome local arguments about which way to approach the problem. One of them is how to sort out the workers who can't afford shelter from the freeloaders who live dirty and like it. Then there is the libertarian case: Jesus was a hippie, man. But for the most part community leaders would like to get everyone back indoors, particularly when it's nasty outside. Of course the ( sorehead view is widespread too. As Jackson Hole builder Jacques Sarthou sees it, "You don't go into Beverly Hills and demand cheap housing just because you want to live...