The Loved One

Literary fiction · Dark comedy · Satire

Print length: 164 pagesBack Bay Books, 1999

Description

Dennis Barlow is a young British poet who comes to Hollywood seeking film work but instead takes a job with a pet funeral service. His work alarms the city’s British expatriate establishment. After a fellow expatriate dies, Dennis handles funeral arrangements at the elaborate Whispering Glades cemetery, where he meets cosmetician Aimée Thanatogenos. He courts her with borrowed poetry, allowing her to believe the verses are his own, while she is also drawn to senior mortician Mr. Joyboy. Evelyn Waugh’s short satire uses these entanglements to target Los Angeles funeral businesses, Hollywood’s British community, and the film industry’s treatment of aging workers.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Descriptive · Ornate · Witty

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Dark · Humorous · Irreverent · Satirical

Structure

Linear

Focus

Character · Ideas · Relationships

Emotional intensity

3 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 4 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 2 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

Art and creativityClassLoveMoralityMortalityWork

About Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh was an English novelist, biographer, travel writer, journalist, and reviewer whose controlled, sharply comic prose made him one of the most distinctive stylists of twentieth-century English literature. His early fiction established him as a satirist of the Bright Young People, presenting fashionable society through farce, brisk dialogue, grotesque reversals, and deliberately simplified characters. Vile Bodies turns parties, scandal, and financial insecurity into a picture of social futility, while A Handful of Dust brings the same pitiless comedy to marriage and the country-house ideal. Waugh repeatedly tested institutions and inherited forms against vanity, incompetence, and modern publicity. Scoop applies that method to journalism, following a political crisis as newspapers manufacture it for readers elsewhere; The Loved One directs it toward Hollywood and the funeral business. His later work could be more reflective and emotionally textured. Brideshead Revisited uses memory, friendship, an aristocratic Catholic family, and a great house to explore the pull of faith and a disappearing social order. Catholicism and conservative politics also became prominent in his nonfiction and journalism.

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Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Back Bay Books
Language: English
ISBN: 9780316926089

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