| Title | : | Loving / Living / Party Going |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0140186913 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780140186918 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 528 |
| Publication | : | First published February 10, 1978 |
Loving / Living / Party Going Reviews
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Read:Living
Series of extended metaphors in Living orchestrate feelings with image of sea and ships with bright flashes of tropical birds or coral reefs, shoals of flying fish, dolphins playing. I would hope to set sail on Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus, but that would be false hope. This is far more Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack, and for longest time coaster fails even to clear harbour wall. It isn't until old Mr Dupret pops his clogs that events begin to engage my interest, to see how young Mr Dupret, arrogant and uninstructed, would get on with prickly foundry workers and over-sensitive works manager. (There's also Lily and love interest, which helps a bit.)
Green rarely uses determiners. Effect at start is poetic, dreamy. But later comes to irritate. It drops and reappears and begins to feel as though the narrator is someone whose native language is not English, but one of those like Polish where determiners are added on to ends of nouns, and whose speakers thus occasionally forget to put them in front.
What went through my head more than once: there's a widely-held prejudice about women working together, that atmosphere can become bitchy. Hmmm. Well read about these Brummagem foundry workers in 1920s slump. Maybe it's not gender thing, but job insecurity thing.
I had one junior moment. Craigan put on his wireless headphones and for a moment I did think Bluetooth. Stoopid. Wireless=radio. Duh. -
Henry Green is (like Dawn Powell) one of those famously forgotten writers, whose oeuvre is brought back into print every 15 years or so, with dust jacket encomia from writers who have achieved more sustained renown.
"Loving", from 1945, has a kind of "upstairs/downstairs" structure in which the doings and conversation of the servants and the gentry on an Anglo-Irish estate are contrasted. The former are baudier but ultimately probably more conventionally moral than their masters - not sure if Green even cares about that, since cadences of speech and diction seem to be his predominant interests. The whole thing is in a slightly brittle tone highly reminiscent of Ivy Compton-Burnett, though ultimately less cynical.
"Living" is one of his earliest, from 1929; it is set entirely among Birmingham steel-workers and the economic and political angle to the story would be hard to ignore, but again linguistic audacity is paramount. The tendency of Northern dialects to make sparing use of definite and indefinite articles is observable in naturalist writers from D.H. Lawrence to Stan Barstow, but Green takes it to an extreme, rendering every utterance a telegraphic series of nouns, verbs and adjectives, piled up like blocks with a minimum of connective tissue. As the longest of the three in this collection, that makes it a bit tough going at times.
Finally, "Party Going" has quite a classical unity and an economy of means that would make it an effective play. A dozen upper-class characters are trapped for an evening in a railway hotel by a dense fog which is preventing their scheduled departure. Forced into close quarters, people's social anxieties, insecurity and manipulativeness are magnified. The depiction of them is satirical but not mercilessly so - the characters retain an amusingly sympathetic quality. -
Three great novels. Poetic, mysterious, true. Not for everyone though as the style (different in each one) can be difficult. This piece of description from 'Loving' has stayed with me for many years:
(The saddleroom)was a place from which light was almost excluded now by cobwebs across its two windows and into which, with the door ajar, the shafted sun lay in a lengthened arch of blazing sovereigns. Over a corn bin on which he had packed last autumn's ferns lay Paddy snoring between these windows, a web strung from one lock of hair back onto the sill above and which rose and fell as he breathed. Caught in the reflection of spring sunlight this cobweb looked to be made of gold as did those others which by working long minutes spiders had drawn from spar to spar of the fern bedding on which his head rested. It might have been almost that O'Conor's [Paddy:] dreams were held by hairs of gold binding his head beneath a vaulted roof on which the floor of cobbles reflected an old king's molten treasure from the bog.
OK quite conventional, but how about this from 'Living' -
Mr Craigan smoked pipe, already room was blurred by smoke from it and by steam from hot water in the sink. She swilled water over the plates and electric light caught in shining waves of water which rushed off plates as she held them, and then light caught on wet plates in moons. She dried these. One by one then she put them up into the rack on wall above her, and as she stretched up so her movements pulled all ways at his heart, so beautiful she seemed to him.
If you don't like the latter you won't like Henry Green. -
Living, Henry Green's first novel, published in 1929 when he was twenty-four, is wisely and wonderfully written in a minor key about minor characters who demand major attention through their flawed, stumbling, enduring humanity.
The setting is Birmingham, England, where men work at a foundry that is foundering. The owner is about to die, but not yet, and the son is about to take over, but not yet. Meanwhile the workers sing and chatter to one another, gossip and comment,and have womenfolk and children at home with just enough cash on hand to make it through the week.
Lily Gates is the moral center of the tale. She's in her early twenties and must stay at home and take care of it for her father, Joe Gates, and her grandfather, Mr Craigan (as he is called). She'd love to have a job, love to live the kind of life she sees in the movies, love to be able to decide who is the better bet for marriage, Mr Dale or Mr Jones, both foundry workers. This ensemble reminds me of Colm Toiban's Brooklyn but the delicacy and ingenuity of the prose, its spontaneity, reminds me more of the flight of pigeons, an airborne motif throughout the novel.
Living is half overheard, a quarter lyrical exposition, another quarter striking, quick-paced encounter. At the same time it is curiously phrased not only in Birmingham dialect but also in a kind of notational style wherein articles and prepositions are deliberately omitted creating stumps of sentences that are pleasant to trip over. Some passages read like Dubliners, others like Ulysses, and then others like the sweeping montages of John Dos Pasos's U.S.A. trilogy, capturing public houses, the fizzing, foaming fury of molten metal, football match jousting, and the unexpected intrusions of the foundry owner's son's romantic disappointments. If he were not necessary to the unfolding of the plot, he would be more than expendable.
For reasons that are not always clear, Green divides this text into chapters. The chapters themselves dart everywhere with no transitional language to remind us that something that once was happening is happening again and is further along toward the police station, the sickbed, or a desperately unhappy elopement that cannot be other other than it comes to be. Mr Jones wants to do right by Lily; he simply can't; he doesn't have the money, the professional skills, the knowledge of the world, or the support of his parents (now lost somewhere in the maw of Liverpool, where he cannot find them.
In many ways Green illustrates the rule that there are no rules for writing fiction--only that whatever you are doing, you have to know how to do it, which he does. -
These three books are certainly among the finest Green wrote. No library in the English language could be complete without them
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I really loved Concluding,and I'm enjoying the first novel in this collected three, Loving, even more, for its "life below stairs" perspective. Green is a master of a kind of narrative strategy that excises all the fluff and chatter and lets the dialogue do the work, like a play, without sacrificing a sense of interior for the characters, in that uncanny way with speech and gesture that playwrights have. His narrators cannot enter into the body, but what is said by our guide, in conjunction with the speaking cast, more than suffices. What I love best is Green's shifts in perspective, the eye-as-camera: we go wherever a character may look, from time to time, very fluidly without a cut, stage direction or narrative announcement.
For example (I'm paraphrasing a scene here),"Look, now, Kate, there's Mrs. Tennant out with her Violet for their morning walk," Edith's face pressed against the cold class.
"My, these peacocks do follow one so. But they are beautiful."
"Yes, it's true. Now, Buzz, come here!." Violet bellows at the dog as Mrs. Tennant turns her distaste for loud voices towards the sky, inspecting the clouds.
I totally understand why Brian Evenson had us read Chekov's short story, "Ward No. 6" and some selections from Colette's shots, with Henry Green's Concluding, in our fiction workshop at Brown. In terms of narrative strategies and innovation, they are kindred spirits.
I especially admire the mileage Green gets out of his titles, ironically engaging and juxtaposing them with the content of each book.
Curious: Henry Green was born into a wealthy family, but his ear for dialogue, eye for domestic/class drama, and perhaps sense of injustice (or mere fascination) during WWII immersed him in working class speech and concerns. I'll be reading his autobiography next, Pack My Bag. -
Well, just Loving but I liked it lot and plan to read the other two, just not right away. Good for folks who like their modernist lit with a bit of Downton Abbey. I liked the subtle humor.
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Loving: Four Stars
Living: Three Stars
Party Going: Three and a Half Stars
Each of these three novels follows multiple characters representing different social strata: the servants and the served in an Irish country house during WWII (Loving), generations of steel foundry workers and owners in Birmingham (Living), and wealthy travelers stuck in a train station hotel (Party Going). The stories can be a little difficult to follow at first: in each, characters are referred to by several names, the narrative jumps around from one situation to another much like a soap opera, and important plot points and aspects of character development are (artfully) revealed through dialogue. These stories are not mysteries (though Loving has what could be called a mystery element), but reading them is a little like solving a puzzle. At first, you have to get your bearings. You are presented with many different pieces, and it takes a little while to figure out what you’re looking at. The further you progress, the clearer the picture becomes and the more quickly it goes. By the end, you have something that seems much more than the sum of its parts. I guess this is true of most books to some extent, but I found it especially true here.
My individual ratings for each of these novels are based partly on the author’s craft—which is admirable, partly on how enjoyable they were to read, and partly on how rewarding they were. I don’t mind doing a little bit of work when I’m reading if there’s a great payoff. Loving rates highest on all three of these criteria. As I got further into Loving, I found myself thinking that it’s begging to be made into a film, and wondering if perhaps maybe it HAS been (as far as I can tell, it has not).
The best ad I can give for any and all of these novels comes from Green himself. Of his inspiration for Loving, he told The Paris Review: "I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the Fire Service during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks, and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy most liked in the world. The reply was: 'Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.' I saw the book in a flash." -
Read Loving on the bus to Manhattan and on Roosevelt Island Thursday 23 August 2012. Green does a wonderful job of letting the characters speak for themselves with minimal third-person omniscent narration. It reminds me of a stageplay in that the dialogue reveals so much about the characters and their secrets, longings, and motivations. It makes the tale more life-like & vivid.
Party Going has been my handbag book since August. Like Loving it focused on class and status through the lens of love. Unlike Loving, where the dialogue could be lifted directly onto screen or stage, Party Going relies heavily upon narration to describe the subtle shifts in moods or the dynamics between characters. Through the narration, readers are privy to the character's thoughts and see the characters behind the scenes before they perform for others. Example: Miss Julia Wray's nervous flighty energy, walk through the fog, and concern about her charms made her seem childish and a bit unstable. In the group, however, we came to learn that she is part of the smart set, is one of Max's love interests, and is quite capable of manipulating situations. Green plays with reader's expectations, showing us different, deeply personal sides of his characters. Repeatedly one or another character thinks, 'you can't tell what people are thinking under the exterior'; so many people misread others and misconstrue their intentions. Love--provoking, spurning, kindling, mulling over, manipulating love--is something the characters play with.
I haven't even begun to formulate my thoughts about the unusual grammatical constructions, imagery of birds (pigeons, seagulls), the role of Miss Fellowes & her illness, the masses outside in the fog (Thompson's kiss with a passing girl vs Edwards's fastidiousness) versus the upper classes holed up in the hotel (with their romantic notions of English working classes and simultaneous fear of 'them' overrunning the hotel).
It was very Woolf-ian in a way: To the Lighthouse, to the train, never going, but it remains suspended as a future possibility on which all hopes are pinned. -
As this edition is 3 novels in one book it is hard for me to review all of it despite having read the whole thing. Henry Green's writing is difficult and slow going, but his characters are fascinating, if confusing. This probably explains why his novels have recently come into the favor of literary critics. This collection of 3 novels gave a very interesting view of the early to mid 20th century and allowed for exploration of the different social classes during this time. While I enjoyed reading the novels and found myself laughing aloud at points, they're much too tedious for a pleasure read. I think I would have gotten much more out of the novels in a classroom or academic setting.
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Loving by Henry Green is about the goings-on between the servants and masters in a castle in Ireland during WWII. It's a pretty simple tale, but there isn't much plot. There's a sort of love triangle between the butler, Charlie, his "man" (aka assistant) Albert, and a chamber maid, Edith, a missing ring, fear of the I.R.A., a drunken cook, an affair between the master's (Mrs. Tennant) daughter-in-law and Capt. Davenport while Mr. Jack (Mrs. Tennant's son) is off doing the army thing... it's more scenes and vignettes of what's happening as opposed to any traditional plot with a climax, denouement, etc.
There were some interesting things in Loving that I don't think I've come across yet in any other novels: firstly, there are two characters named Albert - there is Charlie's man Albert, and then the drunken cook's nephew Albert comes to stay to get away from the London bombings. Secondly, there is a character, Paddy, who nobody can understand except the other chamber maid, Kate. So all the servants will be sitting at dinner, and Paddy will say something. But you only know he said something because Charlie will ask, "What did he say?" and then Kate translates. Also, some of the transition from one "scene" to the next is done almost like in a movie. There isn't any real break in the action (I don't mean literally, action - there isn't any of that); instead, it goes something like this: there is a scene of the servants doing their thing in the castle, and in order to transition to Mrs. Tennant and daughter-in-law walking the grounds, Green will say (paraphrasing here): "While this was going on, Mrs. Tennant..." as if the scene in the castle fades out and we see them walking around. Sometimes this caught me off guard (I wasn't paying attention), and I would think - now where did Mrs. Tennant come from? Why does it now seem like they're out in the yard? So I would have to go back, and then I would realize that Green had subtly transitioned from one conversation to another.
Charlie is an odd character, and you can't really tell what his motives are... in the beginning, the original butler (Eldon) is dying, and Charlie really couldn't care less (well, neither can any of the other servants, but that's beside the point). Charlie is too busy trying to take over for Eldon. He seems kind of sleazy and none of the other servants like or trust him (except Edith). So, when he first starts making passes at her, you can't really tell if he's serious. Even in the end, you can't really tell...he says things that make you think he doesn't really care about Edith, but maybe he's just playing a game to get her to like him back...or maybe he's just a player (or is that spelled playa?). Edith is equally ambiguous. She seems all right most of the time, but then she wants to keep Mrs. Tennant's ring, (which she finds, then it goes missing again). It seemed out of character. I guess most - ok all - of the characters are pretty ambiguous in that way.
An interesting synchronicity is going on with my reading right now...I am currently in the Valley of Bones part of Dance to the Music of Time, in which Nick Jenkins, enrolled in the Army, is sent with his company to Northern Ireland (this is during WWII also). All of the characters in Loving are British nationals (or almost all of the characters - I couldn't figure out if Paddy was Irish) , and there is a big to-do about the IRA, fear of the IRA, fear of the Germans invading, fear for loved ones who may be being bombed, etc. Are they better to stay in Ireland, with all the Irish thugs out to get them and the threat of the Germans invading, or should they go back to England, abandoning the castle? In Dance, as I just mentioned, we're also in Ireland, but from a different perspective...but there's still the fear there. Someone gets attacked while walking to the barracks during a military exercise and has his guns stolen, and it is suggested that it was Irish nationals. It's interesting to see this side of things...I haven't run into stories about the British in Ireland during the war before.
It turns out that Henry Green was a comtemporary, friend, and former classmate of Powell and also Evelyn Waugh. It appears that Green had a colorful life - kind of unexpected, as Loving wasn't every colorful IMO. In conversation, he preferred gossip to serious subjects (not unexpectedly), was known as a ladies man, and eventually became an alcoholic. While at Oxford, he shunned intellectual pursuits in favor of going to the movies twice a day and "scorned his tutor, the bluff, hearty C.S. Lewis." Green also apparently had a cruel streak, and a girlfriend once told him, "Hurting - that should be the title of your next novel."
He was popular among his contemporaries and later authors. W.D. Auden called him "the best English novelist alive" (though he is no longer, since he is no longer alive); Eudora Welty stated that his work had "an intenstiy greater than that of any other writer of imaginative fiction today." And John Updike: "Henry Green was a novelist of such rarity, such marvellous originality, intuition, sensuality, and finish, that every fragment of his work is precious." Really, John, I don't know about that, but to each his own. My grandma always says it's good we don't all like the same things.
Loving is a pretty harmless book - sometimes amusing, short, and easy to get through. Not sure why it made the Modern Library's Top 100, but whatever...oh wait, isn't Updike on the Board? The edition of Loving that I own also contains two other books by Green: Living and Party Going. In the coming years, I will probably read both of them as well. A NY Times reviewer wrote, (of Anthony Powell) "Like Henry Green, an even better novelist, Anthony Powell was too British to catch on [in the U.S.] at first." So, if British comedies are your thing, you'd probably love it. If they annoy the piss out of you, don't bother. I'm somewhere in between. I think the following quote sums up Loving fairly well: "None of [Green's] books illustrates a philosophy, promotes a theme, or delivers a message. With him it is the richness of the felt, heard, and seen moment, often garnished with low comedy, that is the sole point - if, indeed, there is any point at all." -
The 3 best novels by this criminally neglected writer, all in one handy omnibus. If you mesh with his unique style, there are 5 later novels to enjoy and his great first novel, Blindness. If you really catch Green fever (and I really think you should), read his autobiographical Pack My Bag, or Jeremy Treglown's biography/critical study, Romancing. His life was as interesting as his fictional worlds. Green belongs right up in the pantheon with that great generation of British writers that came of age in the interwar period--Greene, Powell, Waugh, Firbank, Compton-Burnett, Bowen, etc.
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"Intensely original" is a perfect way to describe these novels. I also like the word "dazzling" for the way some of the sentences read. The lovliness of some of them actually made me gasp. I do not recall reading anything else quite like this.
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I found Living difficult, but Loving a dream.
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This volume contains three of Green’s nine novels. Green’s burden is the high praise that exacting writers such as Auden and Updike have heaped on him. I decided to give him a try anyway.
The books aren’t printed here in chronological order; the opener, Loving, was the last published of the three. I found it the most accessible, which could explain why it was placed first. Yet even this took a while to get into. It employs much dialogue; punctuation is reduced to a minimum, which means that the phrases are difficult to scan. Once I got the hang of it, I admired how this technique reproduced the way we often talk: elliptically, run-on, colorful phrases interspersed with mundane. At times, the conversations he reports are two monologues, spoken past each other. This, too, came to feel true to life.
The setting is familiar to fans of upstairs/downstairs dramas, although Green devotes more attention to downstairs than up.
There is plot development in the novel in the sense that things happen, but these are less important than bringing characters vividly to life. Spoiler alert: the incidental nature of “plot” is brilliantly expressed in the last line.
The second of the three novels, Living, was the earliest published. It is set among the workers of a Birmingham foundry. The owner and his family also appear, including the effete son impatient to introduce his modern management ideas (the real person behind Green’s nom de plume was himself the son of a wealthy industrialist). But again, the author spends more time depicting the workers. It is a wide cast of characters, but by the end, the focus has come down to one in particular, not necessarily the character one would have expected. Elliptical, picturesque dialogue is also evident. In addition, Green forgoes almost all articles. This could be what some have in mind who include him among the modernists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
In the final book collected here, Party Going, Green turns to the pampered young people he probably moved among in real life. A group gathers to set off on a journey that is delayed when a deep fog enshrouds the station from which their boat train is set to depart. They decamp to the adjoining hotel and spend the next few hours interacting. Then the fog lifts, and they leave. While Green’s dialogue technique is more conventional here than in the other two books, things his characters say are rarely in sync with what they mean or feel. This is expressed in one of the author’s asides that reminds me of Oscar Wilde: “People, in their relation with one another, are continually doing similar things but never for similar reasons.” For the most part, though, Green doesn’t tell, he shows. I found the members of this ensemble “tarsome” to an extreme, and I think this was the author’s intention. The few hours they spend trapped in the fog seem like a season in hell, or at least purgatory, except that the experience doesn’t purge them.
Green’s prose, especially in Party Going, is also remarkable in its use of extended metaphors that suddenly reintroduce the object of comparison to jarring effect.
The peculiarities of Green’s style made the reading slow going, but I found the effort rewarded. -
This three-book volume sucks eggs. Although Modernist authors (many of whose works have been consigned to reduced priced books) thought Green was marvelous calling him a “writer’s writer”, none of his books sold more than 10,000 copies during his life. He was forgotten until the 1990’s when some snob resurrected him and proclaimed him brilliant. This recent promoter should be found. Green’s body should be exhumed. Then, reinter both to a well-deserved insignificance.
Living (1929)
This is a story of the workers at a Birmingham foundry. At the outset, Green inflicts on the reader an innovative technique that undermines the story. (I will show by example: “Reading. Buffeted words penned. Go? ‘spose does. Cain’t need for ‘splainin’. Such be so.”) At the very least, dialogue and colloquialisms should be attributed to a speaker and actions should be stated, not inferred. At the beginning, it is a struggle to read. Green modifies his invention while writing and the reader can make sense of the dialogue by the book’s end.
Party Going (1939)
This story of a privileged class of jerks takes place in a fog and strands the reader in it. Who is going? Why? Where? More importantly, who cares? Green’s technique is tiring and shallow. He jolts the reader from one disjointed paragraph to the next. Why should a reader struggle with confusion? Is this enjoyable? Fortunately, the once trendy technique that brought Green notice proved unpopular much to the frustration of its promoters. Thank God.
Loving (1945)
This book about the upstairs and downstairs of an absent Irish gentry during the war is fathomable. Green abandons much of his novelty. No more struggling. But, as you read a constant question accompanies your thought, “Why should I bother continuing?” I suspect this book made Time magazine’s 100 Best English-language Novels because of an incestuous relationship with the publishing house. -
Loving (4/5)
I had no clue I would enjoy this book so much.
I absolutely adore reading “a day” type snippets of people’s lives, and Henry Green wrote this so well about all these servants that I had to read this in one sitting.
This was my first crack at Green and I was not disappointed! I loved how the narration flowed from different characters/areas of the home and he was able to track my minds eye like this was a movie, more so than any other book I’ve ever read. I seriously had the “camera” zooming in and out of windows to other characters and such.
There was exactly three characters that I liked, and that’s out of at least ten. The dynamic of the servants was certainly something worth reading about and the lives of each of them were so enthralling to find out more about, especially as plots began overlapping and you want to know what comes next. The detestable protagonist and his soft spot for his mother, the queer best girlfriends that you want to see more of, the tough and alcoholic cook, the little kid that could grow up to be a serial killer and so forth and all this in the midst of a war that caused them all so much tension while they lived in a bubble.
I was completely satisfied with everything, except the last two sentences. The ending wasn’t abrupt in the least, but I was hoping for a much darker ending. I didn’t like reading a seemingly childish phrase at the end of the novel to wrap things up, I wanted more since the rest of the book felt like so much more!
I won’t let that takeaway from how good a read Loving was, can’t wait to read more Green. The characters were great, even if unlikable, the narration and descriptions were wonderful, and such a time and setting was something I never knew I needed to read. -
Another bit of classic literature that's a bit hard to read. The author has a fondness for fragments over whole sentences, and it can get confusing at times, or at least hard to follow. This volume is three books in one, mostly dealing with class differences in England. Looking over other reviews of it, I didn't have anywhere near as much of a problem with it as some did, but I wasn't as in love with it as others are.
Decent read, not fantastic. If it hadn't been on one of my far too many lists of books, I'm not sure I would have read it. -
While sometimes incredibly boring, I understand the praise for Henry Green's writing. There are plenty of sentences that slap you about the face just as your eyes start to cross from all the toffs gabbing about nothing.
But the gabbing is impressive. At least, how it's written is impressive. Green's dialogue struck me as effortlessly natural. And not all the characters are toffs. In fact, pretty much all three stories contrast the mewling of upper class English bores with the much larger problems of the working class people they encounter. -
4 stars: Loving. It's outstanding.
2 stars: Living. I couldn't get through all of this. Flat, predictable characters and plot. Continuing to read it felt like a waste of time.
1 star: Party Going. This was basically unreadable. Countless flat characters introduced in the first 20 pages that were doing what, exactly?
I had tried several times over the years to get through one or both of Living and Party Going and I'm finally admitting defeat. I enjoyed Loving so much, I just had to keep trying. As a Christmas present to myself, I've given up. -
I must say that it took awhile to read this volume. I am glad that I did though. Henry Green's voice for hired house staff, factory workers and the idle rich, all rings true. He must have been sensitively receptive to those he had contact with, especially coming from wealth himself. His prose is beautifully descriptive and the dialogue is right on.
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There is some brilliant writing here, some wonderful insights and dialogue, but it's not one I'd readily recommend. There doesn't seem to be any reason to care for these rich, idle, vacuous characters. That said, reading Green is a worthwhile experience in the effect of language. I can see how he may have influenced later writers.
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This was the edition I read, but I only read the first novel, Loving. It was an interesting look at the dying Great House culture in Great Britain and Ireland as it enters WWII. I don't really feel like Henry Green captures female characters well, their inner motivations often seemed more inscrutable than was needed. But the behaviors of the characters felt real.
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I liked Loving, the first story, but the other two were tedious.
