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Title: Doting (Coleman Dowell British Literature Series) by Henry Green ISBN: 1-56478-266-2 Publisher: Dalkey Archive Pr Pub. Date: March, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Spooky.
Comment: Henry Green, I have read, would only be photographed from the back. So I thought I should read his novels backwards-- no! not starting at the end of each book, but beginning with his last book, _Doting_. I could only dream that prose would be so powerful. Henry Green is part tape recorder, part poet. He records language as people actually speak. Yet with an artist's careful touch he elevates everything just a bit. In fact, one might argue his style is not plain or straight-forward, but weird. He takes great chances with the English language, but as he makes it across the tight-wire each time, the effect is exhilerating. This is not strangeness for the sake of strangeness, but an approach to novel-writing that takes nothing for granted. Characters reveal themselves through what they say-- and don't say-- and aren't described out of existence. And who are these characters? People who dote on one another but never really love. The Middletons face middle-age by sinking into their own separate worlds of fear and appetite. Henry Green's view of humanity is not reassuring, but it is not unkind either. If anything, this novel can make us wiser as we listen in on these conversations that move in beautiful, life transforming rhythms. This is a book that is too good to be true.
Rating: 3
Summary: A book that will leave you smiling and scratching your head
Comment: A strange, amusing, and perplexing little book, told mostly through dialogue, about a weirdly cheerful menage a quatre between a handsome middle-aged couple, their dashing widower friend, and a beautiful 18 year old girl, with only the husband and wife ever winding up in bed with one another.
Mr. Middleton dotes on Ann. Mrs. Middleton dotes on Charles. Charles dotes on Ann and Mrs. Middleton. And Ann dotes on being doted on. Author Henry Green presents these people as a gang of befuddled masochists, unwittingly causing themselves great anguish and just as unconsciously enjoying it. The "doting" that they mistake for love is a form of self-torture. Green doesn't treat this doting as perverse. He portrays it as very human and therefore lovable mistake. Needing to feel loved, to feel young and desirable, the Middletons and their friends/would-be lovers try to force love out of others by showering love (or at least professions of it along with clumsy physical demonstrations) on them. None of the characters behaves very well. The best of them, Mrs. Middleton, the good wife and mother, is actually the most adulterously minded, but neither of the men or Ann act with much virtue or good will. And yet Green makes them all likable and all forgivable. He doesn't make us laugh at the characters' foibles but at their predicament. Green isn't as mean as Evelyn Waugh or as angry as Kingsley Amis, fellow Brits who also specialized in comedies of manners. He's not as funny as they are either, but he is a whole lot more humane and more forgiving of his characters' weaknesses.
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Title: Blindness by Henry Green ISBN: 1564782654 Publisher: Dalkey Archive Pr Pub. Date: March, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.50 |
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Title: Nothing by Henry Green ISBN: 1564782603 Publisher: Dalkey Archive Pr Pub. Date: October, 2000 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Loving/Living/Party Going (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) by Henry Green, John Uplike, John Updike ISBN: 0140186913 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 1993 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Concluding (British Literature Series) by Henry Green ISBN: 1564782530 Publisher: Dalkey Archive Pr Pub. Date: October, 2000 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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