Across Sarah Robertson's richly detailed and fascinating study of the “southern” influences in Jayne Anne Phillips's fiction, a tendency emerges that is characteristic of many single-author studies adopting as their methodology such a “close and densely wrought analysis” (270). The tendency is to replicate the author's own style in the interrogation of their prose, effectively undermining the strength of that analysis, by paying too close attention to the author's self-conception of their project. Phillips's own understanding of her work is often deployed in defense of Robertson's critique of it, as if the critical cues were taken from Phillips the person, not from her prose.

Since the book is the first monograph on a writer about whom little has been usefully written, this is totally forgivable, although it does generate potential difficulties for the critical process. Most notably these manifest themselves in an underlying desire for a total critique of Phillips's fiction, a stab at obtaining for the author a canonical position within “generic studies of southern writing” (270) that ultimately appears conservative and hostile to the project of future criticism.

However, the depth of the analysis, and Robertson's ambition in fusing historical-materialist with psycholinguistic methodologies, is at times remarkable. This is especially the case with the readings of female characters, where the synthesis is particularly well wrought. Consequently it is in the final three chapters on Phillips's 2000 novel Motherkind that Robertson finds her own voice: relying less on dense theoretical and psychoanalytic texts (Lacan, Bakhtin, Harvey et al.) to crack the meaning of Phillips's hermetic prose, and instead more usefully exploring the stylistic features that tie Phillips into southern traditions in writing.

Whilst the writing on the Appalachian context is effective at times, it is always framed by a concern for economic and psychological factors, leaving little room for a spiritual or religious dimension. In a study of how southern thought and culture in the late twentieth century informs Phillips's work, this seems like a slight oversight. If Robertson's aim is to turn Phillips into something more and other than the “dirty realist” she is often labelled, then a critique of the southern American religious context would have aided immeasurably.