Party Going

By Henry Green

Book Overview

A modernist "masterpiece" (The New York Times) that will appeal to fans of Downton Abbey and The Great Gatsby

Party Going, published in 1939, is Henry Green's darkly comic valediction to what W. H. Auden famously described as the "low dishonest decade" of the 1930s. London is sunk in an impenetrable fog. Traffic has come to a halt. Stranded in the train station and the hotel connected to it are a group of bright young things waiting to catch a train to the Continent, where their enormously rich friend Max is throwing a party. Green's characters worry and wonder and wander in and out of each other's company (and arms and beds), in pursuit of and pursued by their own secrets and desires.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1681370700
• ISBN13: 9781681370705
• Release Date: April 2017
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.1" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Foggy Notion

The same words crop up again and again but the effect is always one of surprising emotional momentum. The class angle is something of a dead pigeon too as far as I can make out, the comedy here seems so much bigger than that. This is in fact the type of writing that takes the utmost care of itself, I think that's a given, and the characters themselves, well there they are waiting for you the readers to decide just exactly how fog-bound a party either you or they really are. I'll show my own hand right up front by saying the plight of Miss Fellowes as rendered by Mister Green is for me a darkly original twitch upon a tragicomical thread.