Arthur Gets It Over

DOTING (248 pp.)--Henry Green--Viking ($3).

Mr. Middleton, a middle-aged British businessman, is walking home from his club with his friend Mr. Addinsell.

"You know what happened to me? Took my wife out with this girl and she leans on a balcony on purpose so I can look right down the front of her dress."

"What might her name be?" Mr. Addinsell demanded.

"Is none of your damned business." Arthur Middleton laughed. "But things are very different now, aren't they, to when we first went out in London?"

"I don't know, I wouldn't be too sure," his companion demurred.

"Meaning I could be at the dangerous age, Charles? Oh well, all the same, really young girls never have behaved like that in the whole history of the world."

"What do you care, after all?"

"Because she's simply destroying me, the little tart," Mr. Middleton sang out in indignation. "I can't sleep at night any more when I think of her," he said. "In a week or two I'll even be obsessed."

"Oh get it over with, Arthur, and go to bed with the child."

Arthur's attempts to get it over with are the subject of Doting, the ninth novel by Henry Yorke, the British manufacturer of brewery equipment who writes under the pseudonym of Henry Green.

After a series of lunches, Arthur lures Annabel to a cosy little supper at home while his wife is away on a trip. After a bit, he tips the coffee pot over Annabel's skirt. She whips it off and they dab de liriously at the affected parts. At this moment, the wife walks in.

Novelist Green puts a needle in this tired situation that keeps it hopping for 248 pages of superb banality. Wife tries reprisal with husband's best friend, Addinsell, but loses nerve. Husband introduces Addinsell to Annabel to draw him off wife. Annabel plays Addinsell against Arthur. Then Annabel's best friend, Claire, betrays everybody by doing something natural, goes to bed with Addinsell. Arthur's wife, furious at the loss of a lover she never took, joins Annabel in a coterie of insulted virtue against poor Claire. All ends club-bily in a drunken brawl.

Author Green has a famous ear for dialogue. In some of his earlier books, notably in Loving and Concluding, that ear was tuned to the inner music of human personality. In Doting it picks up little more than some pretty tinkles, and a fair amount of surface scratch.

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