"A work of art as rich and subtle and unnerving as anything its author has ever done" ( New Yorker ), The Loved One is Evelyn Waugh's cutting satire of 1940s California and the Anglo-American cultural divide. Following the death of a friend, the poet and pets' mortician Dennis Barlow finds himself entering the artificial Hollywood paradise of the Whispering Glades Memorial Park. Within its golden gates, death, American-style, is wrapped up and sold like a package holiday--and Dennis gets drawn into a bizarre love triangle with Aimée Thanatogenos, a naïve Californian corpse beautician, and Mr. Joyboy, a master of the embalmer's art. Waugh's dark and savage satire depicts a world where reputation, love, and death cost a very great deal. "Fiendishly entertaining."― New York Times "As a piece of writing it is nearly faultless; as satire it is an act of devastation."― John Woodburn , The New Republic "You'd better buy The Loved One , because I can't imagine a purchase apt to corrupt and delight you more...Never before that I can remember has a talent of such austere and classic design been applie to such monstrous vulgarities; never before have the majestic themes of love and death been so delicately perverted to absurdity....It is certainly a work of art, as rich and subtle and unnerving as anything its author has ever done."― Wolcott Gibbs , The New Yorker "Although the locale of The Loved One is Hollywood, it is not filmdom that Mr. Waugh takes in hand, but the American ethos....He finds a touchstone for the mass-mind of America, for the compulsion to 'package' everything, even love and death....Mr. Waugh's treatment of his macabre material is uninhibited, and wickedly funny...as sadistic, playful, and decisive as a cat's paw on a mouse."― Alice S. Morris , New York Times Book Review Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), whom Time called "one of the century's great masters of English prose," wrote several widely acclaimed novels as well as volumes of biography, memoir, travel writing, and journalism. Three of his novels, A Handful of Dust, Scoop, and Brideshead Revisited, were selected by the Modern Library as among the 100 best novels of the twentieth century. The Loved One By Evelyn Waugh Little, Brown and Company Copyright © 2012 Evelyn Waugh All right reserved. ISBN: 9780316216463 One All day the heat had been barely supportable but at evening a breeze arose in the west, blowing from the heart of the setting sun and from the ocean, which lay unseen, unheard behind the scrubby foothills. It shook the rusty fingers of palm-leaf and swelled the dry sounds of summer, the frog-voices, the grating cicadas, and the ever present pulse of music from the neighboring native huts. In that kindly light the stained and blistered paint of the bungalow and the plot of weeds between the verandah and the dry water-hole lost their extreme shabbiness, and the two Englishmen, each in his rocking-chair, each with his whisky and soda and his outdated magazine, the counterparts of numberless fellow-countrymen exiled in the barbarous regions of the world, shared in the brief illusory rehabilitation. “Ambrose Abercrombie will be here shortly,” said the elder. “I don’t know why. He left a message he would come. Find another glass, Dennis, if you can.” Then he added more petulantly: “Kierkegaard, Kafka, Connolly, Compton Burnett, Sartre, ‘Scottie’ Wilson. Who are they? What do they want?” “I’ve heard of some of them. They were being talked about in London at the time I left.” “They talked of ‘Scottie’ Wilson?” “No. I don’t think so. Not of him.” “That’s ‘Scottie’ Wilson. Those drawings there. Do they make any sense to you?” “No.” “No.” Sir Francis Hinsley’s momentary animation subsided. He let fall his copy of Horizon and gazed towards the patch of deepening shadow which had once been a pool. His was a sensitive, intelligent face, blurred somewhat by soft living and long boredom. “It was Hopkins once,” he said; “Joyce and Freud and Gertrude Stein. I couldn’t make any sense of them either. I never was much good at anything new. ‘Arnold Bennett’s debt to Zola’; ‘Flecker’s debt to Henley.’ That was the nearest I went to the moderns. My best subjects were ‘The English Parson in English Prose’ or ‘Cavalry Actions with the Poets’—that kind of thing. People seemed to like them once. Then they lost interest. I did too. I was always the most defatigable of hacks. I needed a change. I’ve never regretted coming away. The climate suits me. They are a very decent generous lot of people out here and they don’t expect you to listen. Always remember that, dear boy. It’s the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.” “Here comes Ambrose Abercrombie,” said the young man. “Evening, Frank. Evening, Barlow,” said Sir Ambrose Abercrombi