I’ve been wanting to try a Henry Green novel for years now.
I’m thinking either Party Going or Loving.
Anyone here a fan? Suggestions?
Here’s a quote to whet the literary appetite: “I asked an old Irish butler his idea of heaven…he told me ‘Lying in bed on a Sunday morning, eating hot buttered toast with cunty fingers.’”
I blame myself. Next time I write a sexier thread-title.
…maybe…“Cunty Fingers.”
Both of the novels you name are difficult due to their characters being virtually indistinguishable without close attention, but they’re probably his two best novels. I’ve read everything of his except Living and the collection Surviving, and Loving and Party Going stick in my memory most (especially Loving which is farcical and poignant at once). The prose of Party Going is especially weird - if I remember correctly, in that one he drops most of the articles from his nouns, so you’ll see a sentence like “Bird startled flew into post and fell.”
You might do best to skip his dialogue-only novels Doting and Nothing till you’re more familiar with his quirks as a novelist. Pack My Bag is an excellent and idiosyncratic sort of memoir. Concluding is nearly as good as the two you name; Back and Caught are in a more ordinary kind of modernist vein (it’s strange to me that he could come up with something as bizarre and fresh as Loving in between two comparatively quotidian works); Blindness is excellent but not what I think of when I think of Green.
The Paris Review interview with him (where the “cunty fingers” quote is from) is unbeatable. He’s half-deaf and repeatedly misunderstands the interviewer, but touches at least obliquely on some of his aesthetics. What a great, underappreciated writer Green is!
Bless your soul. jordanr2.
No problem. Also, looking into my collection of Green’s novels, I realize Living is the one without articles before nouns, not Party Going. All those titular gerunds do throw you.