Nothing

In Nothing the generations face off, with the parents flesh-proud and weary and the children oddly tentative and abashed, each group struggling to understand and have its way with the other. Jane Weatherby and John Pomfret are erstwhile bright young things and sometime lovers, whose long-ago affair had its share of disastrous consequences. Now after World War II and in the midst of postwar austerity, youth and its pleasures seem far way, though nostalgia remains a bond. To them their respective children, Philip and Mary, seem timid and conventional, and it is true that with no money and no great hopes, these young people for nothing so much as stability. Indeed they seem--to their parents’ horror (perhaps because it can’t be ruled out that the two are brother and sister)--bent on marrying each other! Jane and John will do their best to make sure those plans come to nothing....

Nothing and Doting were the last of Henry Green’s novels, two books written almost entirely in dialogue. Not unlike the plays of Samuel Beckett, these arraignments of lust, folly, and helpless misunderstanding are as comic and entertaining as they are dire and mournful.

Henry Green?(1905–1973) was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke. Born near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, England, he was educated at Eton and Oxford and went on to become the managing director of his family’s engineering business, writing novels in his spare time. His first novel,?Blindness?(1926), was written while he was at Oxford. He married in 1929 and had one son, and during the Second World War served in the Auxiliary Fire Service. Between 1926 and 1952 he wrote nine novels—Blindness,?Living,?Party Going,?Caught,?Loving,?Back,?Concluding,?Nothing, and?Doting—and a memoir,?Pack My Bag.

Francine Prose is a distinguished visiting writer at Bard. Her most recent novel is?Mister Monkey. She lives in New York.