Presenting our June Pick for (Book) Soup of the Month - Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One!

When he wrote The Loved One, a short satirical novel set in 1948 Los Angeles, Evelyn Waugh was, indeed, in Hollywood. The popular British author, known for Scoop and a Handful of Dust, had come west to talk about a possible film deal for his master work, Brideshead Revisited. The deal fell through, and Waugh clashed with what he perceived to be LA’s overall lack of propriety. He had a lot of complaints, and he was very inspired.

The Loved One follows Waugh’s surrogate, Dennis Barlow, a young-ish British poet hot off his first realpublishing success. Dennis heads to Hollywood, where he takes- and immediately leaves- a screenwriting gigat a studio, soon after finding employment at a pet crematory, “The Happier Hunting Ground.” Here, Dennis makes house calls to the rich and famous, disposing of their furry dead at outsize expense. But he isn’t the only expat in town, and the older, wealthier British set view his morbid occupation as reflecting poorly on their proud Hollywood community of actors and writers. They urge him to refocus his energy. The thing is, Dennis likes his new job. A lot. Dennis’ fascination with death causes him to wander Whispering Glades, a pristine all-service burial ground and mortuary.

Waugh’s portrait of Glades was clearly taken from Forest Lawn Memorial Park, which he was fascinated with, and which indeed played the part in the book’s totally restructured and poorly-reviewed 1965 film adaptation. It’s here at Whispering Glades that Dennis meets the beautiful and cosmetically gifted Aimee Thanatogenos (literally “beloved, born of death”) with whom he becomes infatuated. Aimee has an infatuation of her own: her boss Mr. Joyboy, a simpering mortician known for imprinting his bodies (called “Loved Ones”) with a blissful smile. Dennis attempts to woo Aimee by sending her famous poems he didn’t write. Mr. Joyboy attempts to woo Aimee by sending her the most radiant corpses to decorate.

 The Loved One provides a searing, viciously observant send-up of 1940’s Los Angeles. While peripherally involving the film scene, Waugh focuses instead on a larger coagulating set of morality and values, a culture of “packaging” people, and indulgent obsessions with beauty, death, and, above all, beauty in death. It’s not only Hollywood that finds itself under fire, but the funeral and mortuary industry, a business portrayed as invasive, exploitative, artificial, and spiritually desolate. Yet, for all its garishness, Whispering Glades exudes gaudy, mystical charm, and like Dennis, the reader cannot resist taking a closer look.

I first read The Loved One in a high school satire lit class alongside Gulliver’s Travels and Candide. As a native Virginian who had never seen anything but the east coast, I was distinctly aware that many of the references to LA culture and geography were far beyond me. I longed to be in on the joke. Five years later, as I journeyed west on a weeklong road trip, I cracked my copy open and found myself again brimming with ghoulish curiosity. It was my first literary picture of Hollywood (and, yes, I still wanted to move here after reading it).

The Loved One is a truly unique book about Los Angeles, written by an outsider who was briefly an insider, a house guest who may have sent a “Thank You” note to his hosts but secretly kept a list of grievances. The book’s success in America baffled Waugh, who perhaps thought we didn’t have the ability to laugh at ourselves, that we didn’t fully understand what he was saying, or a little of both.  While sometimes referred to in criticisms as Waugh’s “hate letter” to America, The Loved One is also unbelievably fun and silly. It’s a crisp, dishy work from a writer at the top of his game.

-Donald, Book Soup Bookseller 

Purchase your copy HERE