The couples above are, respectively, Jake Miller and his wife Liz; his parents, Ellen and Joe Miller; and his brother Daniel and his wife, Brenda. The seventh member of the clan is his sister—the single, directionless Hilary—who has no significant other. They've come together at Jake and Liz's summer place on Maine's Great Salt Island to celebrate Joe's seventy-fifth birthday as well as Liz' and Brenda's pregnancies. Hilary's with child too, though unsure of who the father is. Liz' pregnancy is non-traditional; she and Jake have failed for years, finally opting for fertilization. Brenda's become pregnant via an anonymous sperm donor because Daniel's accident left him not only confined to a wheelchair without the use of his legs, but unable to sire a child. It's the first time in four years that the seven have gotten together; the last time was for a funeral. This is one of the oldest, most enduring of anthropological witnessings, the ritualistic acknowledgment of birth and death, and it fits in well with the overall ambition of the novel. Pitlor is reaching for atemporal truths, here, verities that aren't dependent upon any specific social conditions or the contemporary social climate. (Notice that, in a 350-plus page tale about middle to upper class New Englanders in the year 2000, the Internet is barely mentioned at all). The following describes the typical Miller family get together:

No matter how infrequently the seven gathered, they talked about the same things—their jobs, politics, their travel plans—in the same lulling rhythm as if they had never parted.

But this weekend will be different; feelings and thoughts that have been dormant for years—in some cases, for thirty, forty years—like the lava in a long-quiet volcano, will erupt uncontrollably. The amazing miracle of pregnancy—augmented by, amplified by, the techniques of modern medical technology—is the main theme, with family relations a close second, but Pitlor touches on numerous sub-themes which immeasureably flavor this opulent chronicle.

I'm going to concentrate on the first chapter because it's a model of how to lay down a framework for a long story, and it illustrates, to perfection, how to establish the roots of character—how to give clues as to what is to come further on—and lays down the foundations for the tragedy that occurs roughly in the middle of the book and the rays of hope (in some cases, the rays of disillusionment) which follow. You might say this is a bit narrow in focus and scope; but, in a brief column, I think it's a fair approach. And I think that when we see how much mileage there is to be gotten out of a single chapter, our appetite for the whole work is seriously whetted. To go into the book in great depth, as I stated above, one would have to take each of the seven characters and look at their relationship to the other six, like so:

DANIEL's relationship	to Brenda
	to Hilary
	to Jake
	to Liz
	to Joe
	to Ellen

Etc., etc., and then we'd make a similar chart for each of the other six characters.

The first chapter, "Genetics", follows a definite schematic in its first three episodes, which sequentially introduce us to the three couples. The fourth, about Hilary, is different—and I'll therefore discuss it last, on its own.

The first three contain key elements which define the couples for us, and I'll just get into three now: (1)proxemics, (2) the introduction of an outside intruder injecting stress into the relationship and (3) tension due to a lack of sex and romance. Readers should keep in mind, however, that there are numerous others; differences in jobs and economic status, and the feelings attached to these, make up a great part of this novel. So does the way we begin to see cracks in the apparent solidity of all the relationships. At one point, Pitlor makes the momentous observation that while, of course all, parents love their children, that doesn't necessarily mean that they like them. I felt my ventricles flutter when I read that.

Proxemics | In the field of proxemics, it's customarily taught that most people feel totally at ease in three places—their homes, their cars, and their jobs. In this case, observing the principals at work would be implausible and irrelevant, but Pitlor has us observe them in their kitchens first and, then, in their cars. And, in presenting each, she employs the use of colors to establish both atmosphere and mood:

Daniel no longer liked the color he and his wife had painted their dining room walls. Faded, marble ocher, it was an almost physiological shade. More the color of indigestion than peaceful meals and a happy home—what had they been thinking? He didn't like the walls and he didn't like the pea green place mats Brenda had just bought, or the matching cloth napkins with the pea green flecks.

Ellen Miller stood at the stove, waiting for the kettle to whistle. She imagined her fingers losing sensation, then her arms, her shoulders, her neck. She pictured each part of herself shutting down, then the memories, the knowledge, the sound of her own breath each night, the look of the melon-colored sun setting over the abandoned playground at the end of the street, all of it fading to black.

Jake Miller followed his wife into their kitchen, where she'd arranged the food for the weekend by meals. Next to a carton of eggs on the counter sat a brick of cheddar, a red onion, a bag of mushrooms, a package of sausages. The canister of coffee sat beside the bag of sugar; the baguette beside the raspberry jam; the cantaloupe beside the blueberries.

This is intensely interesting because the three scenes are, more or less, occurring simultaneously, at the same general moment, within the context of the fiction, as are the scenes when the couples take to their automobiles (being in the car with the beloved serves as a symbol of their lives' journeys; Hilary's only involvement with a car, on her way to the reunion, is with a silly old female taxi driver who tells dirty jokes, though, once there, she too has a more meaningful car ride, as we shall see). In the first paragraph above we catch a glimpse of the couples in their cars, where both Brenda and Liz fiddle with the radio dials as if this could adjust the problems in their marriages, which we'll look at first in the form of

The Outside Intruder Injecting Stress into the Relationship | Daniel is obsessed with the anonymous sperm donor; ultimately, this is due to rage at his own impotence and inability to be a 'dad'. "I'm starting to hate how tangential I am in this whole process," he tells Brenda. Her comment, "It's just sperm. It's just science, really" doesn't ease his mind. He keeps bringing it up, trying to imagine what the donor is like. She says, "To be honest, I think it's getting to be unhealthy, this obsession of yours", but he can't let it go. He becomes furious when he learns that she told her mother about the donor (it is an indication, perhaps, of how, in some ways, he is so far gone; could he have imagined that she would'nt tell her mother?).

In the case of Ellen and Joe, the intruder is manifested in the person of MacNeil, the surviving half of a couple with whom the Millers have been friends for many years. Ellen and MacNeil begin to see each other often, after the death of his wife Vera, and she half fears and half hopes that they're letting themselves drift into a romance. The introductory passage is loaded with comparisons she makes between Joe and MacNeil, and most of them are skewed on the positive side towards MacNeil. MacNeil occupies Ellen's thoughts throughout a good deal of the novel; in the end, when one of her children accidentally discovers the liaison and reveals it, all the others treat it as a "so what, they've been friends for thirty years" type of thing, completely misunderstanding. (An aside: Joe has a pet turtle, Babe, which could also be construed as an intruder of a kind.)

The intruder(s) in Jake and Liz's case are the twins babies she's carrying. Though it sounds absurd, they drive a deep wedge between the couple because being pregnant has totally turned Liz off to sex and abstinence is driving Jake mad. He resorts to keeping a secret porn collection in the basement and, at one point, she catches him about to pleasure himself with a Maxim-like magazine. In another incident, half jokingly, he gives her a "gift"—a copy of the Kama Sutra. His gauche nature is such that he can't see the dorkiness of this action:

"I'm not really feeling it, sweetie."

"Because you're sick? Do you feel nauseous?" he asked as innocently as he could. He couldn't help himself.

"I mean I'm just not feeling it on another level. I'm sorry."

Tension Due to a Lack of Sex and Romance | We've already seen how this affects Jake and Liz, and maybe it's something they'll overcome, but in the case of Brenda and Daniel, it seems to be a little more serious:

And sex was no longer the spontaneous, transporting experience it used to be. On a good day, Daniel could manage to get it up for five seconds or so—actually, on a good day, he could manage anything at all. It was obvious that Brenda missed their old talks, as well as their former sex life.

And, as regards Ellen, the idea of MacNeil is almost taking on the proportions of a swashbuckling romantic savior, as somebody to whom she could now look, in her seventies, to immerse her in the kind of ROMANTIC indulgence she feels she's never gotten from Joe. Her idealization of MacNeil goes a tad too far, especially when she contrasts him with the former men in her life:

She was not used to a man expressing such feeling, and so poetically. She was used to men keeping such things to themselves, experiencing happiness (with books, gadgets, cars, all the predictable tangibles) in the privacy of their own minds.

Hilary arrives at the house three hours early. Beholding it from the outside, one of her first thoughts is that "Jake had done well for himself. This fact still amazed her." (Jake, in fact, has more money than all of them put together, being a CFO for a successful firm. In childhood, he played a game with Ellen called 'What Would You Do If You Had A Million Dollars?') Unable to think of much else to do, she walks back to town and ends up in a place called Books & Beans, where she immediately proceeds to let herself be picked up by the counterman, Alex. The chapter ends with Alex and Hilary driving off in his car. In this section, Pitlor introduces a habit of Hilary's that occurs over and over throughout the rest of the book—she rubs her fingertips together. She worries about her "lack of a plan", yet she instantly gives confirmation that this is simply her nature by her subsequent behavior. We pointed out that the chapter ends with Alex and Hilary in the car, and I opened this article with a review of what's transpired in cars between the other six major characters. In those instances, couples who know each other very well seem to be pulling up at the crossroads while, in this case, a couple who has just met start to get to know each other and feel each other out; the discovery of truths is still quite a ways away. There's no fiddling with radio dials in this car! The journey's just beginning. As the two banter about the obvious—her pregnancy, how he likes living on a remote tourist island—it's easy to guess where they're going that afternoon, but harder to place them in the future, and, in this respect, they come to resemble everyone else in the book.

One last point about the structure of the book: Although Pitlor uses an omniscient narrator, said narrator operates from four different perspectives—those of Daniel, Ellen, Jake, and Hilary. Joe, Brenda and Liz don't release their thoughts to us except by their words and actions. In scenes that involve secondary characters—neighbors named Morris Arnold and Dorothy Wenders, a barefoot old man and a boy selling corn, a girl named Vanessa who works for a painter named Corocran—careful readers will observe the full impact of this methodology and why it works so well. I've purposely held back from saying much about these three but they were, for me, the most interesting.

The Birthdays: always elegant, sometimes wistful, occasionally opening wounds widely, now and then carrying us down memory lane, abundantly wise in its knowledge of fascicular family goings-on. These characters are people we've all known our whole lives—our parents, our siblings, our children, our friends and enemies, ourselves.