Doting

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.