His plot...would seem to offer all the surprises of an old sweater, but in Miller’s exquisitely written book, every scene is hypnotic ... Here is a writer of such intimate and insightful prose that stealing away with him for a few hours in another world feels closer to trespassing than reading ... Great writing: As it crystallizes, it grips slowly, quietly, with crushing impact.
Pregnant...sums up the mood of the novel, which cultivates an atmosphere of ominous banality. Ordinary domesticity is charged with a sense of anticipation owing to Eric’s deceit and other connubial secrets ...The story slows almost to a standstill, so that the reader becomes aware of all the descriptive filler ... The skillfully written climax is so distant and chilly that it speaks to a waning of interest in the figure of the philanderer. The novel reads like a wintry elegy to the once proud cad.
A kind of fusion of his character-based and historical work. But while both elements are beautifully done — and beautifully combined — the sway of the past is never far from either of them ... A gently persuasive reminder that every age gets some things right and plenty wrong — and that at the time it’s not always clear which is which.
Although the canvas of this novel is a relatively small one...The Land in Winter manages to capture something of this era of social upheaval ... This is a quiet book about quiet lives; internal turmoil trumping external drama. But the delicate attention Miller affords his characters’ inner lives makes for incredibly satisfying reading. Also notable is his elegant, measured prose.
Miller is a master of nuance, expert at exploring the various chambers of the human heart ... For all its wintry setting and cold echoes of the past, and for all that it opens with a death in an asylum, this is not a bleak book. The people in it yearn and reach; they make mistakes, too – some of them terrible. But all the while, somehow, you feel – you hope – they might find a way through.
Miller’s writing embraces a cabin fever-like feeling of despair throughout the harrowing, domestic tale of woe, while his pacing mirrors the trudge through an endless landscape of snow in the hope of reaching a brighter spring. Themes of winter and darkness are present in the forbidding landscape and also intertwined deep within each character. Sobering and dismal, this work will speak to those seeking a glimpse of the shadows created among 1960s housewives.
