Loving; Living; Party Going (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Have you ever sat and thought, man, I wish someone would write a book about living? And possibly loving? Well, Henry Green has gone out and done just that. I had never thought that a book about going to parties might be necessary, but after reading it I think that Mr. Green has indeed performed a valuable service. This wonderful collection of novels is, quite frankly, a comprehensive exploration, and no new books need be written on any of these subjects. In any case, the writing made my jaw drop in spots, it was so good, and Green way of looking at things is funny and humane while being mercilessly clear-eyed. The only reason I think they've stopped teaching his books in colleges is because they don't have the sort of things one can write papers about: complicated networks of imagery and whatnot that can be dug out of the text and have a title slapped on them. Green's book are too alive to have anything particularly systematic going on in them, while retaining the structure and unity of true works of art. Amazing books, go out and read them.

Written at the end of the Second World War, sandwiched between 'Once upon a day' and 'they lived happily ever after', a death and a marriage, 'Loving' is a fairy tale of the rarest enchantment. While war and social disruption echo from the 'real' world, 'Loving' offers us a sprawling castle from which we never leave, crowded with brilliant peacocks, doves making love on a huge dovecote replica of Pisa's Leaning Tower, and the most elaborately absurd decor in fiction. Within this rarefied, hermetic milieu, broadly familiar from the novels of Elizabeth Bowen and Evelyn Waugh, unravels a tale of a declining aristocracy (the cuckolded man of the house is at war) and cast of bickering, spying, scheming, anxious, unsettled servants, with the focus, unusually, on the latter, especially Raunce the new butler, and Edith, the beautiful, lively maid, two of the richest characters in fiction, not because they're particularly extraordinary, but because Green, in fleet, tightly packed comic-romantic-ironic-prismatic prose, remains alert and faithful to their every mood, whim, desire and fear, creating a genuine, joyful, life-like unexpectedness, and, in the combination of unreal surroundings and emotional realism, rapture after rapture of epiphany, such as the distant sight of two girls waltzing to a worn phonograph, endlessly reflected in the glass of a chandelier. It is one of my favourite books.'Living' is an astonishing achievement by any standards, never mind those of a 24-year-old, and one that suggests that Green's peers are not his schoolfriends Waugh or Anthony Powell, but prose-poets like Virginia Woolf or Samuel Beckett who try to capture the quicksilver complexity of human behaviour. Like 'Loving', 'Living' is a story of the working class, here labourers in an iron foundary in Birmingham, and their wives, daughters and children, with their 'superiors' again playing a subordinate, even ridiculous role. The novel's style is at first daunting, spliced into cross-cutting vignettes, and written in a language that approximates a proletarian idiom. This could have been embarrassingly patronising, a la Galsworthy or Arnold Bennett, but actually facilitates an elastic language full of pure, pregnant poetry. The sharp cross-cutting highlights the novel's many divisions - boss-worker, man-woman, young-old, community-individual etc. - but also connects them in unexpected ways. The title is typically multi-layered - meaning the work people have to do; the way it defines their lives; the struggles of people to better their lives, or simply to live well in an atmosphere of mechanical routine; the idea of class or work as a living in the religious sense, as a vocation you can't avoid. Rigid livelihoods and iron works, a world where the public and private are virtually indistinct, paradoxically produce metaphors emphasising flight, water and fluidity.The focus of these two novels is reversed in 'Party Going', with its cast of brittle Bright Young Things going on ho

I'm sad that the reader from Maine felt so insulted by Mr Green's work. I can only guess that he or she thought they had bought a contemporary pot-boiler to read on the airplane and were shocked to find they were reading a 20th century classic, because the criticism of the dialogue was entirely unjustified. The dialogue in Loving is wonderful - precisely because it is so clearly of another age. It is through the language of this novel that we understand and become enmeshed by its central themes.

All three of these novels are terrific, but I think PARTY GOING is really Green's masterpiece. It's one of the funniest accounts of the Bright Young Things ever written, but it veers beyond Waugh to say much more serious things about class, modernity, social maneuvering, and abovve all compassion--Miss Fellowes' determination to take care of the dead pigeon, while initially absurd, comes to reach almost Shakespearean proportions in its utter pathos and dignity.Green is always overlooked by fans of British social comedy simply because his prose is initially so surprising. But there's a real cult around his writings, and if you start with LOVING (the most accessible of his novels, and one of the best), you'll quickly see why.

I have read both of the three-novel volumes published by Penguin, and while I think even the worst of these is at least good, LOVING shines out as one of the best novels that I have ever read. Set in Ireland during WW II and consisting almost entirely of dialogue (no narrative voice worth noting), it tells a poignant yet hopeful story of love in the upper and servant classes of a country castle and estate. The ending is one of the very best that I have encountered, rivaling my other favorite endings (BROTHERS KARAMOZOV, THE WHITE HOTEL, and POSSESSION).I had serious reservations about the Modern Library list of the 100 Greatest English Novels of the 20th century, but I was delighted to see that they included LOVING.LIVING is not as strong as the other two books, but PARTY GOING, while not the masterpiece that LOVING is, is nonetheless a very, very fine book indeed.