In a village deep in the English countryside, two neighboring couples begin the day. Local doctor Eric Parry commences his rounds in the village while his pregnant wife, Irene, wanders the rooms of their old house, mulling over the space that has grown between the two of them. On the farm nearby lives Irene's mirror image: witty but troubled Rita Simmons is also expecting. She spends her days trying on the idea of being a farmer's wife, but her head still swims with images of a raucous past that her husband, Bill, prefers to forget. When Rita and Irene meet across the bare field between their houses, a clock starts. There is still affection in both their homes; neither marriage has yet to be abandoned. But when the ordinary cold of December gives way—ushering in violent blizzards of the harshest winter in living memory—so do the secret resentments harbored in all four lives.
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.
