The fiction of Henry Green is utterly English in tone. A disdain for used-up rhetoric, a nervous eccentricity of voice, a liking for understatement now and again relieved by shy outpouring of lyricism, a mild yielding to quirkiness as the commonplace of existence—these make him seem an English writer in the line often fecklessly called "minor."…

Green's novels are comedies, but not often of the kind that elicit bursts of laughter. Some of his books are shadowed by fear and delusion, most speak of the usualness of the unusual. Green keeps returning to the deceptions of the self, in "Loving" to that complex kind of deception where the charms of fantasy thicken into hallucination. He avoids the large public themes favored by Victorian novelists; he rarely indulges in ethical or social declamation. Psychologizing is also taboo: no hovering over the emotions of characters, no fussy probing into...