Last night I almost finished Larkin's second novel, A Girl in Winter.  Both books are psychologically unnerving in their grasp of human loneliness.  I couldn't read the Girl, whose protagonist is a female version of the male protagonist in Jill, to the end yesterday:  it was too disturbing. "Kathryn" has, by the war, apparently, had to flee her country and family, and come to England where she once, as a teenager, had what she now imagines--though at the time, a flashback makes clear, it wasn't--an idyllic stay with a comfortably bourgeois English family.  For a while she entertains the idea that reconnecting with this family, and their son, will improve her present situation.  But when they do meet she is utterly detached, feels no connection at all, wants him to go away and leave her alone

or at least when I put the book down last night she was observing herself observe him with the clinical detachment she had brought to the discovery, earlier the same day, that she could be betrayed by a child she'd befriended, by a superior she regarded as beneath her, by her realization that a woman she scorned was capable of disinterested acts she knew herself to be incapable of.  Though it is likely Kathryn is simply more analytical and less complacent.

I'll finish it tonight, I guess.