Henry Green, _Nothing_

PUBLISHED 1950--this is the fourth Green novel I have read, but the first from after World War II. Centerstage is the same generation Green had always been writing about, the Bright Young Things as they are sometimes remembered, the Children of the Sun as Martin Green put it, the Brideshead Generation according to Humphrey Carpenter. Now, though, they have adult children with careers and marital prospects of their own.

These adult children are living in the time of austerity and Attlee, however, and are not having the high old times their parents had at the same age. "They had such a lot of money once and we've never seen what that was," says Philip Weatherby to Mary Pomfret, to whom he is about to become engaged. In some moods, Philip and Mary are glad to be making their way without the privileges their grandparents' wealth created for their parents; when Mary complains of her job, Philip reminds her, "You wouldn't want to go back to the bad old times, Mary [...]. Not when we're making this country a place to live in at last."

"You'll forgive me but your whole generation's hopeless I must say it, so there!" according to Jane Weatherby, Philip's mother--love that "you'll forgive me." The younger set returns the sentiment:

   "They all ought to be liquidated," he said obviously in disgust.
   "Who Philip?"
   "Every one of our parents' generation."

Did I mention that Mary's father, John, had a pre-war extra-marital fling with Philip's mother, Jane? The slender, unspoken, but apparently not negligible possibility that Mary and Philip are half-siblings may account for Jane's immediate and intractable opposition to their engagement. Can she thwart it? Yes, she can, and she does, so much as to say,"we may be creaky and corrupt and contemptible but we got through the Slump and won the war and we can still beat you at any game you propose." The greatest generation!

I have yet to hit a dud novel by Green. Best 20th century English novelist not named Woolf, perhaps.