Now that at least [Loving, Living, and Party Going by] Henry Green, most neglected of twentieth-century novelists, have been reissued (along with Blindness, his first novel …) after more than twenty years of out-of-print oblivion, any unfavorable criticism may seem like a badly timed kick in the face to an author who is just—posthumously—getting back on his feet. Still, though these four Green novels deserve to be welcomed back with praise, that praise should be qualified; writers are, after all, neglected for reasons.

For me, at least, Loving/Living/Party Going do not present Henry Green at his most accomplished. For that, one would have to pick up Caught…. With its weirdly incandescent setting in pre-Blitz London, its atmosphere of desperate sexuality, its awkwardly rounded-out characters and extremely peculiar construction that shifts almost imperceptibly from story to prose poem to slice-of-life dialogue to interior monologue, Caught may be one of the most convincing novels about daily life in wartime ever written…. Green wrote about people and how they got on with one another in the course of daily life, but where his contemporaries Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster would tell all, Green is reticent. Unlike them, he says very little that is direct about his characters, and says it in a style given over to aimless conversations, bursts of dense metaphor and highly mannered description. Often the conversations have the ring and rhythm of real ones, and the prose itself can glow in places with an unexpected radiance. In Caught and Concluding, Green's concern is, as always, with the mundane incidents of everyday living, except that in both books life has assumed a dark, nightmarish quality, so that Green's characteristic reticence and the peculiar milieu of each meet halfway to create phantom worlds so bizarre that the meaning of what happens in them can only be guessed at.

In Loving, Living, and Party Going, Green's reticence keeps us in the dark, but this time in the midst of the talking, eating, working, hating and loving that all fall under the heading of day lit daily life…. Green stubbornly adheres to a set of rules that forbid his drawing us along with either story-line or psychological insight. Nothing happens—that's the point—and no one is explained. Because there is no pervasive rhythm of revelation or event to get caught up in, we are obliged to renew our interest in and revise our opinions of characters of whom we learn nothing with almost every line—a task that soon becomes impossible. We are left with an intentionally objective presentation of characters interspersed with precise descriptions wherein things take on a transcendent glow, and against these dreamlike back cloths the characters' actions are meant to become transcendent, too: mundane but glorious, an affirmation of life itself. Green's hope is that these scenes that never really "go" anywhere or build to anything will coalesce into what he calls in his "self-portrait" Pack My Bag "a gathering web of insinuations," whose accumulation will let flow the feelings we have searched for unsuccessfully on page after page. But when the glow of pure phenomena does not shine with the almost spiritual intensity Green counted on, the going can get pretty tedious….

It is strange to spend two hundred pages with a group of characters who don't seem especially interesting without even knowing why the author bothered with them at all…. Green never tells us what he as author thinks about his characters, so all we as readers can do is keep guessing; are they idiots? are they sincere? are they pathetic? silly? malicious? and is this all "life itself"?…

Only at the end of Loving and Party Going does the uncertainty that has been thrown like a blanket over our heads provide a point/non-point-of-view of its own. We realize, perhaps too late, that the characters might have had depths we'd never suspected. Just as we close each book we feel that at last we know exactly what they were like, though we cannot say it….

[The] author of the laconically-titled Living, Loving, Party Going, Loving, Concluding, Nothing and Doing is anything but giving. His determination to say nothing definite seems too coy, too calculated and too programmatic to be anything but a pose, and a rather cruel one at that. We read and read and read but it seems entirely up to us whether there is something there, or nothing at all—not an especially comfortable position to be placed in…. [To] be elusive on purpose, to avoid, out of reticence, committing oneself deeply to anything (even if it is something as transitory as a feeling) seems like a sneaky kind of sadism when it becomes the guiding principle for novels meant for others to read and presumably get something out of. We want to understand the author, he consistently defies our understanding. Like life itself, you say; like someone who refuses to make himself known, say I…. For those who like to see human interaction as one big riddle (or one big, million-faceted prism), Loving, Living, and Party Going will take the breath away. But those who ask fiction for something more sustaining and certain may accuse Henry Green of taking away the very air they breathe.