The Land in Winter
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.
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Miller’s great strength, developed over nearly 30 years, is his ability to inhabit the inner lives of his characters, no matter how historically distant from our own ... Miller is a miniaturist. His characters deal with tiny things ... In other hands these details could drag, but Miller builds from them a world that is as materially precise as it is psychologically stifling.
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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.
