This book, well-written as it is, is such a slow motion train wreck. It was originally published in 1960, I believe, which is about when it's all set, so it's apparent early on just where the story's going. You can see the disaster coming. Vic and Ingrid are both very young and sexually inexperienced, in their first romantic relationship, and of course Ingrid gets knocked up. Of course she does. Both kids do the expected thing and marry, but they're deeply ill-suited and it's all a horrible mess they can't get out of. Truthfully, the relationship should have fizzled out long before it did - they don't know each other that well, and after the first initial flush of infatuation Vic, who is the narrator of the story, figures out that he doesn't actually even like Ingrid that much. He's at pains to point out that it's not because she's a bad person; they just have nothing in common. With a baby on the way, though, that doesn't matter, and they have to rely on maybe developing, in the future, a kind of love to get them through.

It all sounds a bit grim, and it is I guess. What saves it, and makes this book a genuinely likeable read, is that both Vic and Ingrid are decent kids. They've fucked up their lives good and proper, mostly because they're both completely incapable of negotiating an end to a relationship that wasn't really working for either of them, and that relationship dragged on until the point of pregnancy, when it was just too late to turn back. Neither of them are demonised, is what I'm saying. I feel desperately sorry for both of them, and this relationship, though it ends with reconciliation, is clearly on the rocks for the foreseeable future. It's doomed, frankly, but by the final pages it just seems possible that when their marriage truly ends, one day, they'll both still have their self-respect.