Doting - Softcover

Green, Henry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1846555620 ISBN 13: 9781846555626

Publisher: The Harvill Press, 2011

Synopsis

Doting, the last of Henry Green’s novels, is, as its title would suggest, a story of yearning and lusting and aging in which a wife and a brash young woman run hilarious circles around a hapless hardworking civil servant suddenly seized by long-dormant urges. Like its immediate predecessor, Nothing, it stands out from the rest of Green’s work in its brilliant, experimental use of dialogue. Green was fascinated with the extravagance, ambiguity, absurdity, and unintentional implications and consequences of everyday human communication, and in Doting language slips and slides the better to reveal the absurdity and persistence of love and desire, exciting laughter while troubling the heart.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

Doting begins and ends with a dinner given for seventeen-year-old Peter Middleton by his parents, Arthur and Diana. Annabel Paynton, a young woman of nineteen, attends both dinners; at the second the four are joined by Charles Addinsell, a family friend, and Claire Belaine, a friend of Annabel. In the short time between these two dinners Green unfolds a series of intermeshing and largely unsuccessful relationships. Arthur Middleton courts Annabel, his wife takes up with Charles Addinsell, Charles and Claire embark on an affair. Peter is injured in a car crash on his way to Scotland, where his parents had hoped he would be out of the way while they pursue their own affairs. In relating these botched and timorous affairs, and in presenting the relationship between Peter and his parents, Green examines, with his usual mordant wit and original style, the deceptive differences between doting and loving.

About the Author

Henry Green (1905–1973) was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke. Born near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, England, he was educated at Eton and Oxford and went on to become the managing director of his family’s engineering business, writing novels in his spare time. His first novel, Blindness (1926), was written while he was at Oxford. He married in 1929 and had one son, and during the Second World War served in the Auxiliary Fire Service. Between 1926 and 1952 he wrote nine novels—Blindness, Living, Party Going, Caught, Loving, Back, Concluding, Nothing, and Doting—and a memoir, Pack My Bag.

Michael Gorra is the author of, among other books, The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany and Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches English at Smith College.

About this edition

• Publisher: The Harvill Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1846555620
• ISBN 13: 9781846555626
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224