The Loved One
by Evelyn Waugh
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Book Summary Information
Author: Evelyn WaughEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-09
ISBN: 0316926086
Number of pages: 164
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780316926089
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Loved One
Book Review: Waugh's Blackest, Funniest Moment
Summary: 5 Stars
How brilliant an author can be when he doesn't give the slightest hoot about any of the characters he breathes life into! "The Loved One" is a brutal read, but those who read it will uncover a fabulous entertainment precisely because of its total lack of sentiment.
Failed poet Dennis Barlow has left his native England and, much to the embarrassment of his fellow ex-pat Brits, taken work as the front man for a Los Angeles pet cemetery, Happier Hunting Grounds. While making funeral arrangements for his former living companion, a scriptwriter-turned-suicide, Barlow meets and romances a cosmetician at Whispering Glades, the in-place for dead celebs who crave some final status before they go. Using some recycled poetry from the likes of Shelley and Shakespeare (he's long since run out of gas on his own), Barlow manages to woo young Aimee Thanatogenos from under the attentions of chief Whispering Glades undertaker Mr. Joyboy. But will Joyboy play fair with his rival?
One confusing thing people often say about "The Loved One" is that it's a Catholic satire on the materialist way people handle the subject of death. Waugh was a devout Catholic, and a satirist, but it strikes me that "The Loved One" is rather agnostic in tone, without a religious character or idea presented as buttress against the nihilist vision of the book. I don't think people are wrong to be disturbed by it that way. "The Loved One" satirizes the non-religious nature of death as memorialized at Whispering Glades, but not so much with the suggestion of an alternative as with the notion that talk of non-sectarian "better worlds" is like whistling in a vacuum and, at best, frivolous. After a few reads, my sense of "A Loved One" is that it could be a book written by a Lutheran, a Jew, or an atheist. I could be wrong, but I don't think so.
The fact that the novel still manages to be entertaining even as it runs against the grain of Waugh's moral and spiritual beliefs is testament to the author's brilliance. It's one thing to write the Crete passage in "Officers And Gentlemen," where the awful carnage of the battle is presented with a sense of some higher significance. When Barlow returns home one day and finds his old friend swinging from the rafters in a noose, we are told "his reason accepted the event as part of the established order." Barlow is an artfully rendered protagonist precisely because he is so lacking in character or decency. He is a thorough clod. Readers tackling "The Loved One" for the first time are well-advised not to make the mistake of caring for any of the characters in it, especially not him.
My favorite part of the book is the opening, where we meet Barlow and his companion, the aging screenwriter-turned-hack-publicist Francis Hinsley. "Kierkegaard, Kafka, Connolly, Compton Burnet, Sartre, 'Scottie' Wilson. Who are they? What do they want?" asks Hinsley over sodas-and-whisky, taking in the literary "new breed" which was by then either dead or collecting pensions. There's a wonderful sense of comic disengagement, the idea of Hollywood as some Somerset Maugham outpost in deepest Africa, and the Tinseltown focus is something we lose as the novel goes on, which I missed.
The rest of the book is a clever forum for Waugh's brilliant observations and off-handed commentary about a life lived in a world without standards. Aimee notes at one point: "Once you start changing a name, you see, there's no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better."
Or the infamous single episode where we meet Mr. Joyboy's mother, who had "small angry eyes, frizzy hair, pince-nez on a very thick nose, a shapeless body, and positively insulting clothes." Who says adverbs ruin good writing?
As I said, "The Loved One" is not for the fainthearted. I almost wish my edition didn't come with a Charles Addams cover illustration; it sets the wrong expectation. This is a "fiendishly entertaining" read only for those who go into it not expecting to be fiendishly entertained. It's for the dour pessimist in us all. But it's definitely one of the best novels ever written, precisely because of its unremitting focus on the things mankind naturally would turn away from if it could, and the dark amusement it finds from such exploration serves as a kind of triumph of the literary imagination we can still celebrate today.
Summary of The Loved One
Mr. Joyboy, an embalmer, and Aimee Thanatogenos, crematorium cosmetician, find their romance complicated by the appearance of a young English poet.The prolific Waugh--an English novelist and satirist perhaps best known for Brideshead Revisited--described this slim, vicious comedy as "a little nightmare produced by the unaccustomed high living of a brief visit to Hollywood." The setting is the L.A. funeral industry, where Whispering Glades provides deluxe service to deceased stars and their families, and the Happier Hunting Ground does the same for dead pets. (At Whispering Glades, staff must refer to the corpses only as "Loved Ones.") The industry provides a perfect foil for Waugh's deadpan wit--and an apt metaphor for the movie business.
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