Loving; Living; Party Going (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) [Paperback]

Henry Green (Author), John Updike (Introduction)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"His novels made more of a stylistic impact upon me than those of any writer living or dead."
      --John Updike

"Green's novels reproduce as few do the actual sensation of living."
      --Elizabeth Bowen

About the Author

"His novels made more of a stylistic impact upon me than those of any writer living or dead."
      --John Updike

"Green's novels reproduce as few do the actual sensation of living."
     --Elizabeth Bowen

John Updike author of Rabbit, Run and other celebrated works, is a preeminent American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet.

Product Details

• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics; Reissue edition (February 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140186913
• ISBN-13: 978-0140186918
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #281,537 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

79 of 81 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Limpid, fluid and porous as water; soars like a bird. October 26, 2001

By darragh o'donoghue

Format:Paperback

Written at the end of the Second World War, sandwiched between 'Once upon a day' and 'they lived happily ever after', a death and a marriage, 'Loving' is a fairy tale of the rarest enchantment. While war and social disruption echo from the 'real' world, 'Loving' offers us a sprawling castle from which we never leave, crowded with brilliant peacocks, doves making love on a huge dovecote replica of Pisa's Leaning Tower, and the most elaborately absurd decor in fiction. Within this rarefied, hermetic milieu, broadly familiar from the novels of Elizabeth Bowen and Evelyn Waugh, unravels a tale of a declining aristocracy (the cuckolded man of the house is at war) and cast of bickering, spying, scheming, anxious, unsettled servants, with the focus, unusually, on the latter, especially Raunce the new butler, and Edith, the beautiful, lively maid, two of the richest characters in fiction, not because they're particularly extraordinary, but because Green, in fleet, tightly packed comic-romantic-ironic-prismatic prose, remains alert and faithful to their every mood, whim, desire and fear, creating a genuine, joyful, life-like unexpectedness, and, in the combination of unreal surroundings and emotional realism, rapture after rapture of epiphany, such as the distant sight of two girls waltzing to a worn phonograph, endlessly reflected in the glass of a chandelier. It is one of my favourite books.

'Living' is an astonishing achievement by any standards, never mind those of a 24-year-old, and one that suggests that Green's peers are not his schoolfriends Waugh or Anthony Powell, but prose-poets like Virginia Woolf or Samuel Beckett who try to capture the quicksilver complexity of human behaviour.... Like 'Loving', 'Living' is a story of the working class, here labourers in an iron foundary in Birmingham, and their wives, daughters and children, with their 'superiors' again playing a subordinate, even ridiculous role. The novel's style is at first daunting, spliced into cross-cutting vignettes, and written in a language that approximates a proletarian idiom. This could have been embarrassingly patronising, a la Galsworthy or Arnold Bennett, but actually facilitates an elastic language full of pure, pregnant poetry. The sharp cross-cutting highlights the novel's many divisions - boss-worker, man-woman, young-old, community-individual etc. - but also connects them in unexpected ways. The title is typically multi-layered - meaning the work people have to do; the way it defines their lives; the struggles of people to better their lives, or simply to live well in an atmosphere of mechanical routine; the idea of class or work as a living in the religious sense, as a vocation you can't avoid. Rigid livelihoods and iron works, a world where the public and private are virtually indistinct, paradoxically produce metaphors emphasising flight, water and fluidity.

The focus of these two novels is reversed in 'Party Going', with its cast of brittle Bright Young Things going on holiday to the Riviera. In a startling narrative conceit predating by two decades Bunuel's similar film 'The Exterminating Angel', the entire novel takes place during four hours in a London railway station, as the passengers are stranded by a heavy fog. Wrenched out of a glittering social context, the party-goers' superficial personalities are exposed, their petty selfishness barely masking fears (identity, sexual, social, gender, age, the future etc.) and resentments. As their tempers fray in the railway hotel, the suburban crowd below sing and laugh and grow increasingly irked outside, a terrible mass embodying various hysterical anxieties for the socialites when they can be bothered to notice them. As this structural image suggests, 'Party Going' can be read as a 'State of the nation' allegory, written between 1931 and 1938, and oppressively articulating the general deterioration of a decade Auden called 'low, dishonest' - it is irresistable to see it portending the coming war and social upheaval. The novel begins with a character finding a dead bird, and besides the fog-dark plot inertia that stills the novel, 'Party Going' is suffused with thoughts and images of sickness and death, its minimum narrative unfolding in interminable, sterile tableaux. If this makes it sound like a downer party, I must add that it is Green's funniest novel, with situations and dialogue as laugh-out-loud funny as Waugh, but with the added, mercurial Green poetry (water and birds again) and descriptive geometry, lending dignity and depth to non-entities who don't seem to deserve it.

Three novels - some of the most remarkable prose of the 20th century. Read more ›

37 of 40 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Writer's Writer's Writer April 2, 2002

By KS

Format:Paperback

If John Updike is a writer's writer, Henry Green is a writer's writer's writer! This volume is an excellent introduction to this little known, fascinating, 20th century British writer.

"Loving" reminds one of "Remains of the Day" but even though it was written decades earlier is richer in theme (notice the peacocks in the book).

"Living" is my favorite of Green's novels, a lovely evocation of working class life that contains some of the most beautiful prose of the 20th century (stylisticly, Green eschews the use of articles, and this gives his prose an other-worldly poetic quality).

"Party Going" is at once more existential and more funny... upper class silly young things (kindred spirits of Bertie Wooster) are caught in an Ionesco-esqe fog that traps them in a train station (notice the pigeons in the book).

If you love Green as much as I did after finishing this volume, you'll quickly seek out his other 6 books.

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't be put off by those who have missed the point January 7, 2000

By John Hendry

Format:Paperback

I'm sad that the reader from Maine felt so insulted by Mr Green's work. I can only guess that he or she thought they had bought a contemporary pot-boiler to read on the airplane and were shocked to find they were reading a 20th century classic, because the criticism of the dialogue was entirely unjustified. The dialogue in Loving is wonderful - precisely because it is so clearly of another age. It is through the language of this novel that we understand and become enmeshed by its central themes.

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Green tackles the big subjects June 12, 2003

By Gulley Jimson

Format:Paperback

Have you ever sat and thought, man, I wish someone would write a book about living? And possibly loving? Well, Henry Green has gone out and done just that. I had never thought that a book about going to parties might be necessary, but after reading it I think that Mr. Green has indeed performed a valuable service. This wonderful collection of novels is, quite frankly, a comprehensive exploration, and no new books need be written on any of these subjects.

In any case, the writing made my jaw drop in spots, it was so good, and Green way of looking at things is funny and humane while being mercilessly clear-eyed. The only reason I think they've stopped teaching his books in colleges is because they don't have the sort of things one can write papers about: complicated networks of imagery and whatnot that can be dug out of the text and have a title slapped on them. Green's book are too alive to have anything particularly systematic going on in them, while retaining the structure and unity of true works of art. Amazing books, go out and read them.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Such a treat June 3, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

All three of these novels are terrific, but I think PARTY GOING is really Green's masterpiece. It's one of the funniest accounts of the Bright Young Things ever written, but it veers beyond Waugh to say much more serious things about class, modernity, social maneuvering, and abovve all compassion--Miss Fellowes' determination to take care of the dead pigeon, while initially absurd, comes to reach almost Shakespearean proportions in its utter pathos and dignity.

Green is always overlooked by fans of British social comedy simply because his prose is initially so surprising. But there's a real cult around his writings, and if you start with LOVING (the most accessible of his novels, and one of the best), you'll quickly see why.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars LOVING is one of the best novels I have read January 6, 1999

By Robert Moore HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

I have read both of the three-novel volumes published by Penguin, and while I think even the worst of these is at least good, LOVING shines out as one of the best novels that I have ever read. Set in Ireland during WW II and consisting almost entirely of dialogue (no narrative voice worth noting), it tells a poignant yet hopeful story of love in the upper and servant classes of a country castle and estate. The ending is one of the very best that I have encountered, rivaling my other favorite endings (BROTHERS KARAMOZOV, THE WHITE HOTEL, and POSSESSION).

I had serious reservations about the Modern Library list of the 100 Greatest English Novels of the 20th century, but I was delighted to see that they included LOVING.

LIVING is not as strong as the other two books, but PARTY GOING, while not the masterpiece that LOVING is, is nonetheless a very, very fine book indeed.