Nothing by Henry Green

"I wonder if it's why the relatives won't come."

"No Philip really. You know what their whole generation is!"

"How d'you mean?"

"Well they wouldn't let a little thing like that, I mean of going to bed, what we've just been discussing, make the slightest bit of difference would they?"

"I don't believe it is a little thing."

"No more do I."

"That's where the whole difference lies," he said "between our generations. Their whole lot is absolutely unbridled."

Philip Weatherby and Mary Pomfret are two young lovers about to announce their engagement to their parents. The problem is, their parents, Jane Weatherby and John Pomfret, are old lovers, whose affair with each other once ruined both of their marriages and threw their entire social world into upheaval. This event--like most events in Henry Green's novel Doting--is talked about only obliquely, and we are left to intuit that, beneath the layers of British gentility and emotional repression, what happened between Jane and John was rather volcanic. The two parents set about sabotaging the marriage in the way only the British can, or perhaps the way only Henry Green's characters can, without ever openly or explicitly acknowledging that they're doing so. In fact, once Philip and Mary begin to inquire with Jane and John about a little worry that has been niggling at the back of their minds--is it possible the pair are half-siblings?--it's difficult not to see the writing on the wall.

Among other things, Nothing is a book about generational differences. Jane and John come from the generation that came up between the two world wars, whereas their children are the products of post-World War II austerity. They see themselves as infinitely more sober and earnest than their parents, especially about things like love and sex, which they somehow take both more seriously and less obsessively, or so they believe. There is something inverted about the parents, primarily concerned with their flirtations and social lives, and the children, whose lives revolve around work. Jane and John are flighty and selfish, but their children are worse: they're bores. It was never quite clear to me why Jane and John are so against the marriage of their children, except that perhaps they take the possibility that Mary is John's daughter seriously. Or perhaps it's simply that the children's conception of marriage as an institution of respectability and sacrifice threatens their own open, freewheeling flirtation, which has carried on for years, much to the chagrin of the current lovers to which they seem rather lightly attached.

And this is all, of course, circumscribed with the narrowness of permitted language among the English bourgeoisie. Only Austen, I think, is able to express such a range of feeling and personality within such narrow constrictions. Like Doting, which as I understand it is often seen as a companion piece, Nothing is almost entirely dialogue. In both books, Green acts as something like an invisible eye, recording the language of the English classes that would have been familiar to him. (And it's interesting to me how well Green, a pretty posh guy, captured the voice of the middle and lower classes over his career.) Green famously wanted his dialogue to express the opacity of the human mind, and to dramatize how little we understand from someone's words just what they are thinking of feeling. But often I felt the language here does something almost opposite, unveiling and exposing people's true intentions even as they try to keep them hidden. It's genius-level stuff, but I have to admit that I liked best the moments where Green lets himself intrude upon the conversation to offer one of his paragraphs of jagged modernist language. For all that is great about both Doting and Nothing, they often felt to me like a novelist running away from the height of his own powers.