![]() With Green I had no idea, and still don’t. There were insights to admire, huge passages where you could see how the spell was being cast phrase by phrase. In Anna Karenina, though, I had some sense of how Tolstoy was doing it. Like Tolstoy – and this is the only similarity – ordinary life seemed to be taking on an intensity and strangeness that it had never possessed before on a page. But I knew almost immediately that this was one of the great reading experiences of my life. Not because of plot, because there was almost none, and not because of fine writing, because Green’s sentences were often baffling, and certainly not because I liked the characters, because they were virtually interchangeable, not particularly bright, and had few apparent concerns other than sleeping with each other. ![]() Within three pages of Party Going I couldn’t stop. Auden and Rebecca West, and I bought the book because I was curious why I’d never heard anything about the author. The cover was filled with praise – extravagant praise, not the polite bookjacket variety – from people like W.H. ![]() I’d discovered an ugly paperback in a used bookstore a few days earlier containing three of Henry Green’s novels: Loving, Living, and Party Going. ![]() ![]() I’ve only read a few books in my life with awe: Anna Karenina was one, when I was 19, and Party Going was another, a few years later, read at a single sitting in a dark corner of the college library. ![]()
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