Henry Green is one of my "mean to read soon" authors who I just haven't quite gotten around to yet. He wrote nine novels and a memoir while also working in his family's engineering firm. Interestingly he went to school at Eton where he became friends with Anthony Powell (whose quartet of books I had set out to read this year...and didn't accomplish--still would like to get back to them), and was a friend and literary rival of Evelyn Waugh who he met at Oxford. He seems to be part of that literary milieu that I am so interested in--writing between the wars and into the 1940s.
John Updike wrote the introduction to my copy of Living Loving and Party Going and Green seems to be an author he greatly admires--not only was he a great writer but a "revealer of what English prose fiction can do in this century". His novels are chronicles of the mundane yet Updike says they are unlike any others.
"And they have become, with time, photographs of a vanished England. Their substantive content, in human psychology, in social mores, in what can be seen and heard by a man alive in a place and time, is as rich as their formal design is intricate, rounded and pleasing. They are among the most contemplated novels of an age, not long ago, when novel-writing came easy, because 'simply everything has importance, if it happens'."
I like the sound of an author who not only gives pleasure but can instruct. And I love that he can give a window onto the world of a long gone England. Why have I not yet read him? My library has all of his novels, and I own an omnibus edition of three of them, which I am assuming are either considered his best or are his most popular? I shouldn't probably count him as a lost in the stacks author as his works are in print still (most are published by Dalkey Archive Press who I consider to be a publisher of high quality literature), but when I was scanning the library shelves for an interesting book and I saw those lovely little Hogarth Press editions, I had to slide one of them off the shelf.
I opted for Concluding, which was published in 1948. Henry Green considered it one of his best novels. It's set in a girls' school where two students have gone missing. The story takes place over the course of a day as the administrators try and hush up the disappearance while they look for the students. It sounds like the sort of story where not a lot happens, yet so much is revealed by the smallest actions.
Maybe Henry Green should be my next classic choice!