A party of rich young men and women waits in a London station hotel for the fog to lift. They were leaving for France, but the boat train has been cancelled. Upstairs in the hotel they wait for news. Downstairs in the station thirty thousand people wait, trapped inside by the fog, to catch their trains home from work.

Max Adey has organised the continental trip. He is enormously rich and is paying for everyone. He has tried to escape his lover, Amabel, in order to pursue Julia, and has invited Angela as a backup. Evelyn, Alex, Claire and Claire's husband Robert, have been invited as a smokescreen. At least, that's my interpretation, because the reasons are as many as the characters. Miss Fellowes, Claire's aunt, is ill and being looked after by two retired nannies who came to see off their ex-charges. Claire wants to go to France and tries to persuade herself that she has no responsibility for her aunt. Amabel turns up, to Julia's disgust. Everyone is talking about Embassy Richard, who has made an enormous social faux pas. It's all strange, opaque, almost certainly allegorical, and very funny. ( )

Long before Seinfeld came along with the show about nothing there were modernist writers writing novels about nothing. The plotless novel, bereft of much in the way of story, depends instead on a focus on daily life and psychological states, and a demanding experimentalist mode of writing sure to trip up less talented authors. Thankfully Henry Green was not one of these, as evidenced by the application of that trite phrase “a writer’s writer” one can find applied to him in various articles and essays.

Party Going is about a group of people stuck at a train station for a few hours due to heavy fog - a concept famously ripped off by Seinfeld in the episode where the characters are stuck at a mall parking garage because they can’t remember where they parked (but maybe Jerry Seinfeld didn’t, in fact, adopt the idea from Henry Green, who am I to say). These are terrible, shallow people, much like their later parking garage stranded brethren. Where they differ, however, is in their being much higher up in social class, and in being much more boring.

Green’s second novel, Living (Party Going was his third), focused on the working class of Birmingham, people like those who worked in Green’s family owned factory. For my money those characters were far more worth reading about than these ones who inhabit a moneyed class like Green himself. Trying to survive the daily grind is simply more interesting than trying to figure out who sent a letter to a newspaper about a socialite missing an embassy party he wasn’t actually invited to.

So this became a novel for me that was not that easy to want to resume reading. What rewards it gave were to be found in the prose construction, which is top notch - Green was, in reality, a writer’s writer. Here’s how the novel begins:

Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.

The driving rhythm of that sentence I find remarkable and most enjoyable! Could be up there with my favorite opening lines of any novel I’ve read (Lolita’s, not that you asked, are my best ever). What follows from there is a bunch of nonsense described most exquisitely. If I had to lay out one passage as evidence that this book is worth reading despite all the nonsense, I think it would be this one, describing the moment the artificial lights in the station’s waiting area turn on above the massed crowd of delayed passengers:

Fog burdened with night began to roll into this station striking cold through thin leather up into their feet where in thousands they stood and waited. Coils of it reached down like women’s long hair reached down and caught their throats and veiled here and there what they could see, like lovers’ glances. A hundred cold suns switched on above found out these coils where, before the night joined in, they had been smudges and looking up at two of them above was like she was looking down at you from under long strands hanging down from her forehead only that light was cold and these curls tore at your lungs.

Good Lord that’s good. ( )

Where did I hear about this one? https://travellinpenguin.wordpress.com/2021/06/13/simply-sunday-16/

This was another novel of Green's that I could not get into. I found the setting, characters, themes, writing, and effect to be sorely lacking and generally placid and uninteresting. I was not hooked and reading this felt more like a chore than anything else. Overall, I was not impressed and do not recommend this novel.

Barely 2 stars, yet again. ( )

A fantastic novel! As with other modernist masterpieces such as "Ulysses" and "Under the Volcano", "To the Lighthouse" and "Gravity's Rainbow", you have to submit to the style until you are moving in its rhythm - but that is in fact the essence of modernism, which is why so many of the great works in the tradition gather negative reviews at Internet sites (and probably would have a hard time getting published today). Don't let the naysayers dissuade you. Henry Green is a master and this is one of his greatest achievements. ( )