This book has been preceded by several novels and collections of short stories and is succeeded by the short story collection What Was Mine (1991).

It represents an important advance in Beattie's conception of how she can best unify novels.

She herself has called Chilly Scenes of Winter, her first novel, more like a play than a novel, and cites as an improvement her 1980 novel, Falling in Place (McCaffery and Gregory, interview in The Literary Review). In that book, Beattie first employed italicized passages as a unifying device, as she attests, so that she could include material that she has left out. The climax of this book occurs when the overweight son of a divorcing couple shoots his sister with a gun his cynical "best" friend has given him.

Although at times, both John Joel and his sister Mary elicit our sympathy, critics complain that the book...