Souvenir (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

The short story collection Black Tickets, which contains “Souvenir,” was Jayne Anne Phillips’s first major publication. It appeared in 1979. Most commentary on the book discusses the collection as a whole.

Critical reviews of Black Tickets tend to make certain recurring points and distinctions. Commentators focus on the longer stories in the collection (of which “Souvenir” is one). Mary Peterson describes these stories in The North American Review, writing that they “have at their center a young woman who makes contact, or misses it, with one of her parents.”

Peterson had called some of Phillips’s shorter stories “flashy,” and Doris Grumbach, in a review for The Chronicle of Higher Education, writes that they achieve their power from unnecessarily “ornate” language. In poetic prose, most of the stories in Black Tickets are about drug-addicts, pimps, prostitutes, and other marginal figures. They are shocking, then, not only because of how ornately and densely they are written, but also because the voices which speak come from outside the mainstream. Peterson considers that the longer stories “show more range, take bigger risks, and mostly succeed at what they try.”