Will I love The Loved One?

I first read this book as a teenager and missed the full force of its ferocious satire. Re-reading it years later, I laughed out loud. Waugh’s genius is to set his story of a love triangle in a Los Angeles funeral home. This way, he gets to poke fun at Hollywood and the American funeral industry while giving the dead a prominent role in the drama.

When, for example, embalmer Mr. Joyboy starts wooing young cosmetician Aimée Thanatogenos, he does it through the expressions he puts on the faces of the corpses he sends to her makeup studio. When Aimée… show more.

I love a story set in a time and place I have scant reference for. Based partly on the English author’s experiences visiting Hollywood (during the filming of Brideshead Revisited), this book features a hyper-specific look at British expat life in Los Angeles in the 1940s. Sure, why not?

Things really get moving when the pet funeral home and love triangle plots begin a catastrophic entanglement that can only end in tragedy (but, like, in that ironic way, that’s fun to read about).

Evelyn Waugh’s 1947 visit to Hollywood to negotiate a movie deal for Brideshead Revisited was a failure. But a trip to Forest Lawn Cemetery provided the gist for The Loved One, his last great satire. Waugh transforms Forest Lawn into Whispering Glades, a grandiose Disneyland of Death where cosmetician Aimée Thanatogenos puts the finishing touches on elite Los Angelenos under the lustful eye of mortician Mr. Joyboy. The naïve Aimée meets Dennis Barlow, a British expat and failed writer who passes off the works of Tennyson and Keats as his own. When she discovers Barlow works at the Happy… show more.

Let’s end on a delightfully weird and silly note, with this pure dark humor confection by Evelyn Waugh. Set in the absurd world of the luxury funeral industry, this book will have you alternating between hilarity and deep, existential horror. A little whiplash-inducing, but Waugh’s command over the smallest subtleties of language and tone is truly a delight to witness. It holds a special place in my heart because I was reading it on one of the first trips I took with my husband—so a pro tip, to really enjoy this text to the fullest, try having someone bring you… show more.