Synopsis
Satirizing the tedium of upper-middle-class life in post-war London, this novel depicts a world in which substance is far less important to anyone than appearance. The question asked throughout the text concerns the differences between doting and loving.
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Review
"Mr. Green possesses perhaps the most accurate ear of any contemporary novelist.... Doting is a masterly exercise in technique.... It has some of the best moments of comedy Mr. Green has yet written." --The Times Literary Supplement
"The formidable author...has set out to write a funny book in Doting, and he has succeeded." --John Betjeman, The Daily Telegraph"Nothing and Doting...actually display something close to old-fashioned formal perfection." --Charles McGrath, The New York Times Book Review
"The sincere and almost religious conviction of the primacy of guilt in human relations is one of Green's most fruitful sources of inspiration, and he forcefully develops it in Doting and Nothing, his last, great, and dismally underrated novels." --The New Criterion
"A skillful intaglio of inconstancy which is pleasantly deft and devious." --Kirkus Reviews
"And in their sheer absurdity Nothing and Doting are two of the funniest novels ever written, bringing to an almost abstract essence the humor that had always been woven through Green's work." --The Atlantic
"The intelligence, the blazing gifts of imagery, dialogue, construction, and form, the power to feel both what can and what never can be said, give Henry Green's work an intensity greater . . . than that of any other writer of imaginative fiction today. . . . His remains the most interesting and vital imagination in English fiction in our time." --Eudora Welty "The sincere and almost religious conviction of the primacy of guilt in human relations is one of Green's most fruitful sources of inspiration, and he forcefully develops it in Doting and Nothing, his last, great, and dismally underrated novels." --Brooke Allen, The New Criterion "In all of [Green's] novels we are made aware of the most profound and surprising truths about life, love and the human heart without being able to pinpoint any one page, line or moment of epiphany. To read [him] is to find oneself in the presence of rare genius, fit to sit along Woolf, Fitzgerald and Joyce on anyone's shelf of classics. Henry Green is here to stay." --David Wright, The Seattle Times "Mr. Green possesses perhaps the most accurate ear of any contemporary novelist.... Doting is a masterly exercise in technique.... It has some of the best moments of comedy Mr. Green has yet written." --The Times Literary Supplement "The formidable author...has set out to write a funny book in Doting, and he has succeeded." --John Betjeman, The Daily Telegraph
"Nothing and Doting...actually display something close to old-fashioned formal perfection." --Charles McGrath, The New York Times Book Review
"A skillful intaglio of inconstancy which is pleasantly deft and devious." --Kirkus Reviews
"And in their sheer absurdity Nothing and Doting are two of the funniest novels ever written, bringing to an almost abstract essence the humor that had always been woven through Green's work." --The Atlantic
From the Back Cover
While in Loving, Henry Green explored the baffling exhilarations of romance, and particularly romance below stairs, with a kind of bemused detachment, in his final novel Doting, he reflects a more resigned view, that of a long-married man observing love less as passion than as a set of habits. Arthur and Diana Middleton are middle-aged, upper-middle-class couple in post-Second-World-War London who become both painfully and farcically aware of the limitations of their lives together. The main object of their doting maybe their only son Peter, but Arthur's weakness for Annabel, a young lady of Peter's generation, brings the family to a crisis.
Doting, a novel told almost entirely through dialogue, is among the most elegiac, most bitter-sweet of Henry Green's novels, and like his other wholly distinctive books, a small classic.
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Doting. By Henry Green
Seller: ThriftBooksVintage, Tukwila, WA, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Dust jacket missing. First edition THUS. Shelf and handling wear to cover and binding, with general signs of previous use. Boards betray fading and nicks and other signs of wear and imperfection commensurate with age. Binding is tight and structurally sound. Pages without any extraneous marks. Sealed in plastic for shipping. Secure packaging for safe delivery. Seller Inventory # 1565562045
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Doting. By Henry Green
Seller: Wonder Book, Frederick, MD, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Condition: Good. First edition copy. . Good dust jacket. 1st American edition. Gifter's inscription on front endpage. Dust jacket price clipped. In protective mylar cover. From the collection of American book critic Michael Dirda. Dirda worked as a columnist for The Washington Post from 1978 to 2026 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his criticism. He has authored two collections of literary criticism and several works on books and reading. (Relationships, Adultery, Psychological Fiction). Seller Inventory # B13OSa-00023