The Loved One

Reviewed here 11 years ago, I returned to this Evelyn Waugh novel in preparation for a discussion of the 1965 film version directed by Tony Richardson. The last name of character Aimee Thanatogenos, I now realize, appropriately means "born of death" and her first name translates as "the loved one." What is striking in the text is not the satirizing of America but the way Waugh dispenses with dramatic set-pieces. For example, when Thanatogenos learns, to her horror, that her presumed future husband works at a pet cemetery, the reader is given nothing more than the fact that she attended the funeral of a parrot and saw him there. Everything else has been subtracted. This also happens with the suicide by hanging of Sir Francis Hinsley, which most other authors would have licked their chops at writing. Instead Waugh refers to it, almost in passing, as funeral preparations are described. The Loved One is a real masterpiece of wit and concision.