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

by Henry Green, John Updike

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

book data

109 ratings, 4.08 average rating, 24 reviews (more data...)

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published

February 1st 1993 by Penguin Classics

binding

Paperback, 528 pages

isbn

0140186913 (isbn13: 9780140186918)

description

This volume brings together three of Henry Green’s intensely original novels: Loving brilliantly contrasts the lives of servants and masters ...more

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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 246)

All ratings | 5 stars (50) | 4 stars (27) | 3 stars (24) | 2 stars (7) | 1 star (1) | avg 4.08

all | this edition

Tisa

Tisa rated it:

02/20/08

bookshelves: currently-reading, prose-fiction-and-prosefiction

recommends it for: anyone

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 ...more

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Lisa

Lisa added it

02/08/08

Read in February, 2008

Of this volume, I read only Loving, which is tremendous. The other two titles are not on any of my blasted lists but if I can get through my next two bookclub books before this is due, I'll happily read Living and Party-Going as well.

It requires a lot of attention. It's told mostly in dialogue, and has dialogue tags, but if you don't pay attention to who said what how and to whom, all the time, you miss the tension and undercurrents. I went back and reread and rechecked...more

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Paige

Paige rated it:

07/23/07

Read in January, 2006

I found Living difficult, but Loving a dream.

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Kate

Kate rated it:

05/23/07

Read in May, 2007

"Her voice was thick with love. She shut the door."

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Kristin

Kristin added it

08/29/08

Read in August, 2008

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......more 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."...less

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Josh

Josh rated it:

04/16/08

Read in February, 2008

Of the three novels in this volume (which I bought on the strongest recommendation from a friend), I've read so far only the last one, Party-Going and part of the first one, Living.

Party-Going is a tremendous short novel, written in "real-time," it seems, the events of the novel unfolding during the two or three hours of a massive train delay caused by London fog. (The time is the 1930s.) I say "real time" because it seems that you could read the book in exactly as much ...more

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Alan

Alan rated it:

01/25/08

Read in November, 1980

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 satyed 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 win...more

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Trena

Trena rated it:

06/22/08

Read in April, 2008

recommended to Trena by: book club
recommends it for: nobody

This book is allegedly one of the top 100 books of the century. It is hideously terrible and completely unreadable. It is basically a transcript of complete mundanities. I can see how, perhaps, it was innovative when it was written (but surely he wasn't the first to write about the "downstairs" of a great house), but it is ungodly awful. In my opinion, this is an Emperor's New Clothes kind of book. It can't possibly be as stupid and pointless as it seems, smart people say it's awe...more

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W. rated it:

12/25/07

recommends it for: Everyone

The novelist James Chapman gave me this book as a birthday present many moons ago, and it was my introduction to the works of one of my now favorite authors. Living is the weakest book of the three. The first title, Loving, is a masterpice. The last title, Party Going, is somewhat Woolfean, very good, and falls just short of being a masterpiece.

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Karen

Karen rated it:

08/17/08

bookshelves: brit-lit, classics-to-read, ml-top-100

Read in August, 2008

I've only read Loving so far, which I liked but I found hard to get into. I had a hard time following the story. It was really interesting to read about life in a country house from the servants' point of view. I do hope to read the other two stories and more Henry Green as well.

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Ivy

Ivy rated it:

06/19/08

bookshelves: 1001-books, times_100_best

Read in June, 2008

I only read Loving but maybe someday I'll go back and read the others.

Amazing use of dialogue to move the story. Very fun read with lots of great quirky characters...not to mention peacocks.

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Jay

Jay is currently reading it

10/17/07

bookshelves: currently-reading

Has a copy to sell/swap

We read 'Loving' for PfoHo Book Club, and I'm looking at the entire volume now because I'm working on a writing project in which I'd like to approximately emulate Green's style.

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Bryan

Bryan rated it:

09/02/08

One of the most incredible writers, pay close attention to the character integration at the start of his books or you'll be lost quickly. 'Loving' is my favorite of these.

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Gabriel

Gabriel rated it:

08/02/08

I don't exactly know why I related to Henry Green so much. Perhaps it was that these books seemed real in a way other books I had read were not. They're perfect and small.

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Susan

Susan added it

06/02/08

Although I made it past 50pp, I gave up on this one. I can't say it wasn't interesting, but a little convoluted, and I kept falling asleep. It's the right book for someone.

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John

John rated it:

03/06/08

Read in April, 2008

three more short, intensely focused novels by henry green. he is flat-out an all-time fave. as terry southern called him, "a writer's writer's writer."

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spencer

spencer rated it:

09/17/07

The book's title makes you think that you are about to read about boring English people. But "Loving" might be one of the funniest books I've ever read.

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Alisha G

Alisha G rated it:

11/05/08

Fine enough, but I found they just couldn't keep my interest. I read Loving, and got halfway through Party Going.

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Kurt

Kurt added it

01/23/08

bookshelves: fiction

Read in January, 1993

Terry Southern recommended Green to me and as good as all his novels are is Terry's Paris Review interview with Henry. Don't miss it.

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nathan

nathan added it

11/14/07

i so wish this were all one title, as it would be one of my favorites... the individual pieces are nice too

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