I WAS introduced to the writing of Jayne Anne Phillips as a high school student. Our class had taken a field trip to hear Phillips speak. "Machine Dreams" had been out a couple of years, and her lecture was one of those outings designed to get students interested in reading, particularly the works of West Virginia authors.

As the slim, dark-haired author stepped to the podium and began to speak, we fidgeted in our seats and showed few signs of interest. But as she began to read from the novel, I was drawn into this story of war, family and West Virginia.

Years later, reading it again as this month's Sunday Book Club selection, I was quickly reminded of what makes Phillips such a notable author. Her characters, who are members of a rural West Virginia family, move the story along with remembrances of growing up during the stark years before and after World War II and during the national uproar of the Vietnam years.

Phillips

Phillips shows her readers life in West Virginia from the inside out. Her novel details the close ties we feel to our families and our homes and also the way these ties are always changed and sometimes even jeopardized by events outside these hills.

"Machine Dreams" opens with a series of childhood memories. Jean Hampson tells of a childhood marred by financial problems and her father's mental illness; her husband, Mitch, describes lonely years being raised by an aunt after his mother's abandonment and father's death.

Phillips writes the story of Mitch's tour in the Pacific Theater during World War II through a series of letters sent home to friends and relatives - mild, reassuring letters to family and stark letters to friends describing the horrors of war.

The bulk of the second half of the novel revolves around the Hampsons' children, Billy and Danner, and the turmoil brought to their family during the Vietnam War. Danner is a dreamer, anxious at the breakup of her parents' marriage, and the passages in the book that are told from her point of view are some of the most poignant:

The men stood in a semicircle behind their table, their bodies attentive, watching each other's lips.

Amazing grace, they sang slowly, how sweet the sound.

The waitresses stood still, surprised. The song filled the hall and was somehow reminiscent of childhood; the same plaintive melody was sung at countless day camps and night sings, at reunions and revivals, at funerals and YWCA and Rainbow Girls. But the ministers didn't sound plaintive; their voices were stalwart and definite. They were breaking bad news and offering comfort, and the words seemed ancient, confessional, inarguable. I once was lost. But now, I'm found. Their powerful voices made Danner a little afraid. ... Every winter, the old picnic table her father had been given by the State Road Commission sat out back, covered with even snow that froze unbroken like a thick, cold cloth. I was blind but now I see. Danner had a sudden wintry vision of the house from above, the roof a snowy butterfly shape, the yard and fences surrounding the field all white, deep, silent with snow. Her father had built that house. How could someone else ever live there?

When "Machine Dreams" was re-released in paperback in 1999, The New York Times praised it as "a remarkable novelistic debut and an enduring literary achievement." Certainly, Phillips is one of our state's most talented writers.

To contact Regina C. Davis, use e-mail or call 348-7936.