And yet I found Green to be a different kind of writer, with almost none of the chronicler’s impulse that from time to time directed Updike’s decade-long projects, and with no abiding interest in realism, despite his extraordinary eye and ear and his gift for capturing character. The religious analogy was excessive, but what had made me admire Updike in the first place was the way in which he’d deliberately made room for the mundane, for the banality that fills our lives and makes them truly interesting. I must have bought the three-novel volume of Loving, Living, Party Going because John Updike had, in his introduction to the volume, not only given Green centrality as a precursor, but called him a “saint of the mundane”. About Henry Green, however, there’s an irreducible, longstanding excitement among the few who have read him. Then Henry Green came along, and Graham swiftly became, for me, the “other Greene”, and then not even that. I’d tried reading Graham Greene, but had never made much headway. Both belonged to well-to-do families, but Green was particularly affluent. He was almost an exact contemporary of Henry’s: born in 1904, a year before Green, he lived much longer. The Green people were talking about then had an e at the end of his surname, and his first name was Graham. I n the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student in Oxford, I bought a volume of three novels by an author I hadn’t heard of, Henry Green.
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