A host of conflicts animate Green's books—between the classes, between the generations, between expectation and reality—but none is so prevalent as that between what is said and what is understood. The ways Green's people manage to misconstrue each other constitute almost a catalogue of the hazards of language—solecism, lying, obfuscation, mumbling, on the part of the speaker; inattention, lack of interest, insufficient data, on the part of the listener. For Green, communication is so damnably difficult that when it is achieved—by sign language, shouting, or sheer luck—the appropriate response is rejoicing….

[Blindness] is an accomplished novel, and all the more impressive in view of the author's age, but it offers little of the compelling originality of Green's later work. Still, Blindness sheds considerable light on this singular novelist. Its first twenty-five pages are from a diary John keeps at Noat before the accident...