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Doting, the last of Henry Green’s novels, is, as its title would suggest, a story of aging and yearning in which a wife and a brash young woman run hilarious circles around a hapless hardworking civil servant suddenly seized by long dormant desire. Like its immediate predecessor Nothing, it stands out from the rest of his work in being composed almost entirely of dialogue, and in both books, Green’s fascination with the extravagance, ambiguity, absurdity, and unintentional implications and consequences of everyday human communication leads to scenes that are as grimly funny as they are deeply sad.
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3.0
Literary Lane
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“Five friends become intertwined in a twisted circle of affairs in this short novel written almost completely in dialogue. Green is great at that thing called verisimilitude, and all of the benefits of using dialogue to enhance story telling can be seen in his writing. The novel is broken into short scenes where usually no more than two of the main characters are present. It is interesting to see all of the different character pairings, and how each character speaks and perceives things depending on who they are talking to. The book suffers a bit from the heavy outdated English vernacular, and it sometimes seems like the characters exist in a sort of white space because there is nearly no exposition. I liked it overall, but not as much as Nothing, the other Henry Green I’ve read.”
About Henry Green
Henry Green (1905–1973) was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke. Born near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, England, he was educated at Eton and Oxford and went on to become the managing director of his family’s engineering business, writing novels in his spare time. His first novel, Blindness (1926), was written while he was at Oxford. He married in 1929 and had one son, and during the Second World War served in the Auxiliary Fire Service. Between 1926 and 1952 he wrote nine novels—Blindness, Living, Party Going, Caught, Loving, Back, Concluding, Nothing, and Doting—and a memoir, Pack My Bag.
Michael Gorra is the author of, among other books, The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany and Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches English at Smith College.
Michael Gorra is the author of, among other books, The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany and Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches English at Smith College.
Other books by Henry Green
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