The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh
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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 Waughs deadpan wit--and an apt metaphor for
the movie business.
Features:
Amazon users' favorite review of Waugh's 'The Loved One' : "...those who
read it will uncover a fabulous entertainment precisely because of its total
lack of sentiment."
Even after the author seemingly presented himself enough times as
dispassionate about Hollywood, the subject is convoluted. I should know, I
grew up in L.A. Therefore, I hardly see where the following passage, for
example, is demonstration of an author who cares not of his characters, or
who despises sentiment and who believes that a true artist must sacrifice
sentimentality in order to pursue hard truths, as has been stated elsewhere
on the web.
"Aimee Thanatogenos spoke the tongue of Los Angeles; the sparse
furniture of her mind -- the objects which barked the intruder's shins -- had
been acquired at the local High School and University; she presented
herself to the world dressed in obedience to the advertisements; brain and
body were scarcely distinguishable from the standard product, but the
spirit-- ah, the spirit was something apart; it had to be sought afar; not here
in the musky orchards of the Hesperides, but in the mountain air of the
dawn, in the eagle-haunted passes of Hellas. An umbilical cord of cafes
and fruit shops, of ancestral shady businesses (fencing and pimping)
united Aimee, all unconscious, to the high places of her race. As she grew
up the only language she knew expressed fewer and fewer of her ripening
needs; the facts which littered her memory grew less substantial; the figure
she saw in the looking-glass looked less recognizably herself..."
Romance and sentimentality, the inner depths of a woman's sensual
psychology, are not confined to some cheap joke on the Simpsons. They
can be part of a complex human psychology that, yes, may unfortunately
include the compromise of otherwise vibrant people into cheapened,
gullible automatons, especially in America, Vidal's 'farm.' Waugh's perfect
little gem is a tragedy, a romantic, sentimental tragedy, more than it is a
satire. In fact, it is these former things more than anything else, as I see it,
and only uses the literary form of satire because there's no other way to
describe this god damned hell hole of a town.
-Peter Reilich
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