The title for this review is both the message of this book and a comparison with Henry Green's great novel, Loving. Doting is a book with a minuet-like interaction of older men and younger women (with a few young male nonentities thrown in). The partners change, but their need to dote or be doted upon does not. It is an enjoyable novel, but is more in the way of an entertainment than something more.Green usually showed parallel groups of upper and working class Englishmen and women, and it is this fuller class dimension, as well as brilliant writing, that gives Loving and Party Going such power. Doting is just the upper class, and it suffers for it. This is good Green, but not great.