Forever odd …

… Henry Green Is As Good As His Word. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Green’s critics all stress the degree to which his books are unlike each other, and certainly the social milieux he describes do change from one to the next: a downstairs view of an Irish country house in Loving (1945), for example, and then Concluding’s (1948) state school and socialist future. Nevertheless, his fiction from Living on is all marked by two things. One is his reliance on irresolution, his refusal of narrative neatness. Two girls in Concluding disappear one morning; one of them never returns, and her absence remains forever unexplained. But her vanishing seems something more than a loose end—it’s elliptical and numinous, and close to a mystery in the theological sense of the term. The truth cannot be known, and this takes me to the other thing that links his books: his interest in the way people talk, in the texture and deceptions of human speech, its enormous variety even at its most clichéd.