Reading Green

 The Second Story outside carts had a Penguin paperback of three novels by Henry Green, Nothing, Doting, and Blindness. At $5, I thought it worth a look. It was.

My first impression was of the high proportion of dialogue in Nothing and Doting. The last books I read in which dialogue so greatly exceeded narration and dialogue were George Higgins's crime novels The Friends of Eddy Coyle and Digger's Game.

My second impression was of the build of the characters. One of the women in Nothing has fat fingers, so-called at least twice. One of the young women in Doting has fat thighs, another has fat features. The middle-aged woman has "bulk". I assume that the men are not lean, either, for one in Doting has given up lunching on account of his weight. Given that, it seems hazardous for a man to sit on the arm of a woman's chair, then slide his way in beside her; yet that happens a couple of times. Nor can I quite see how the maneuver is actually managed.

Evelyn Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford, "I think nothing of Nothing." His objection was to the dialogue, which he thought wrong for characters of that class. Of course I have no way of evaluating that. Waugh also wrote poorly, but in passing, of Doting. Do the blurbs on back cover, from respected writers, have reference to these particular novels?

Blindness is a much earlier, very different novel. It reads as a first novel, and in fact it was. According to Wikipedia, it was largely written at Eton, which appears in the novel under the near-anagram "Noat".