Henry Green

Over the years, I've read a few of Henry Green's novels. This includes Loving, which was selected by the Modern Library as one of their top novels from the twentieth century. 

In general, I've found Green's works to be clear and precise; there's a polished quality to his prose which I admire, and which, for me, is refreshing.

Party Going -- which is among Green's more celebrated novels -- exemplifies many of these characteristics: Green's writing is smooth, even burnished. Like Evelyn Waugh, with whom he overlapped at Oxford, Green can be funny, too: there's a comic element to Party Going, and the laughter, when it comes, is well deserved. 

All of that said, I found Party Going to be a failed experiment in -- I suppose you could say -- modernism. The first third of the novel focuses on dialogue: indeed, dialogue at the expense of everything else. Green's characters -- wealthy, educated, vain -- are hopelessly entwined. And yet, without any structure to support that dialogue, the characters are slow to emerge. 

The second third of the novel reads, in some ways, as an attempt to correct the first: here, Green introduces context and background; his characters have histories and emotion. The structure of this part of the novel, while not traditional, is certainly more conventional: paragraphs are employed, the transition from one story to the next more clear. 

The final section of the book poses a question: can these characters be taken seriously? What has all of this dialogue amounted to? Part of me felt that Green, having constructed these personalities, only worked in the final pages to tear them all down. These bright young things -- so emblematic of the interwar years -- seem a joke: they are largely motivated by conceit and hierarchy. The potential for redemption is not entirely clear. 

If Party Going is a failure, that does not mean it's not fun to read, or that it does not, in parts, reach for something greater than itself. The comedy alone is very well executed -- as is Green's sense of time and space. All told, though, I couldn't stitch the pieces together: perhaps, in the end, I was searching more, well, conventional.