Beattie's most noticeable technique is her plain style. She uses simple declarative sentences and an accumulation of facts and detail, presented in neutral tones at an unforced pace, to render how time passes without real significance or fulfillment. Her dialogue, flat, full of non sequiturs and whimsy, reinforces this sense of aimlessness and low-level depression. In addition, she is constantly dramatizing the ways in which the flotsam of popular culture become part and parcel of character in an age without moral or spiritual values which are shared. Characters use song lyrics, for example, as shorthand notations on their emotional states of being or intellectual lethargy. Often these lyrics serve to create mood and to contrast the glory of the past with the trivia of the present.

In Chilly Scenes of Winter her passion for detail can become mind-numbing, but her deadpan humor relieves the sameness of the prose...