Deborah Eisenberg On Henry Green
Deborah Eisenberg writes: ‘All the books of the twentieth-century British novelist Henry Green are relatively short and unobtrusively but highly condensed. And anyone who has read several of them will almost certainly have observed not only how different they are from one another, and in how many ways, but also that one of their shared features is how stunningly different they are from anybody else’s. Although Green (1905-1973) had read a lot when he was a student at Eton and Oxford, and in the later part of his life claimed to read a novel a day, it’s as if he was the first writer on the planet and had never learned what a novel is supposed to be like.’
