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Summary: Very clever, quick read
Review: This short novella is well worth the price of admission. Although Waugh is a brit who usually writes books about the English "smart set," he perfectly captures the vacuous and insidious nature of 1930's Hollywood. The characters have little self-insight, which makes for some wickedly funny moments.
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Summary: Another classic from the English satirists
Review: The Loved One is a tale of great hilarity, serving mainly as anecdotal work to the body of Waugh's satirical efforts. It is not as polished or well targeted as some of his other works, particularly "Brideshead" or "A Handful of Dust", though this is largely due to the fact that he is writing about Hollywood rather than the English society with which he was eminently more familiar. With one of the better endings in the top 100 of modern fiction, this book is a must read.
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Summary: cemetery send up
Review: I lived in California and have a thing for cemeteries and that could be what makes this one of my favorite books. It's a satire on the American funeral industry and the competition between Whispering Glades a send up of Forest Lawn and the Happier Hunting Ground, a pet cemetery. Very funny, wonderful parodies of poetry.
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Summary: the great novel of Hollywood
Review: After a brief, apparently unpleasant, stay in Hollywood--he had been commissioned to adapt his novel Brideshead Revisited for the screen--Evelyn Waugh wrote this wonderfully wicked satire of the movie business, the funeral industry, lowbrow Americans and whatever other hapless targets wandered within range of his savage pen. Dennis Barlow is a young British poet, who, having lost his movie job, is temporarily employed at The Happier Hunting Ground, a pet cemetery modeled after the hallowed Whispering Glades, graveyard to the stars. But such a lowly job is anathema to the British expatriate community, as Sir Ambrose Abercrombie informs him: We limeys have a peculiar position to keep up, you know, Barlow. They may laugh at us a bit--the way we talk and the way we dress; our monocles--they may think us cliquey and stand-offish. but, by God, they respect us. Your five-to-two is a judge of quality. He knows what he's buying and it's only the finest type of Englishman that you meet out here. I often feel like an ambassador, Barlow. It's a responsibility, I can tell you, and in various degrees every Englishman out here shares it. We can't all be at the top of the tree but we are all men of responsibility. You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs--except in England, of course. That's understood out here, thanks to the example we've set. There are jobs that an Englishman just doesn't take. However, when Barlow's roommate, Sir Francis Hinsley, is abruptly dismissed from his studio job and hangs himself, Abercrombie and his fellow Cricket Club members depend on Barlow to arrange the burial--after all, he knows about how to dispose of animal remains, how much different can it be? So Barlow heads over to Whispering Glades where he is treated to a hilariously garish tour and sales pitch. He meets and falls in love with one of the cosmeticians there, Aimée Thanatogenos, but must hide the truth about his embarrassing job, particularly since she is also smitten with Mr. Joyboy, the legendary embalmer at Whispering Glades. When she proves unresponsive to his own poetry, Barlow woos her with passages from the great poets, the works of whom she is utterly ignorant. Naturally, it all goes bung, as Barlow's various frauds are revealed and Aimée kills herself. Barlow extorts some money out of the scandal fearing Joyboy and buries her at the Hunting Grounds, so: Tomorrow and on every anniversary as long as the Happier Hunting Ground existed a postcard would go to Mr. Joyboy: Your little Aimée is wagging her tail in heaven tonight, thinking of you. Waugh lays bare a Hollywood where all is pretense and illusion, where human lives--never mind human feelings--are meaningless, where semantic niceties, like calling a corpse a "Loved One" are intended to mask reality. It is brutal, and unfortunately still timely, and quite certainly one of the best novels ever written about the movie industry. It is also just a screaming hoot. GRADE: A
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Summary: The American Way of Death Is About the Cheapening of Life
Review: In America, we tend to value an acquaintance mostly by his or her productivity or usefulness to us. We tend to compensate for that shortcoming subconciously by mounting extravagent retirement banquets and flowery, overwrought funerals full of ungenuine sentiment. But who says we can't love a person while they are still with us, and why can't we bother ourselves to appreciate our differences and to address them in a kindly and loving way before the end of our time together? Mr. Waugh, I think, says all this in "The Loved One," but in a much more entertaining fashion. Indeed, you won't even realize it till you're done enjoying the book. I prefer the mainstream British Waugh of works like "Brideshead" or "Decline and Fall," but Waugh shows he is perfectly comfortable with American material as well in this slim volume.
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Summary: Clever, Hilarious, Unique
Review: Waugh is far and away the most unique writer of satire in the 20th century. His bizarre twists of plots never cease to impress and amuse. The Loved One is consistently entertaining, satirical, and comical. Waugh's superb command of the English language--his amazing ability to turn a phrase just so--utterly astonishes me. It is fun to watch for the constant poetical quotes Waugh satirically weaves into this tale. The Loved One mocks Hollywood, America, and the English all at once. I can not put into words how unique and clever this book really is; the scenes Waugh conceives, the wording he employs, the characters he creates, even the names he chooses, all work to create an entirely "different" reading experience.
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Summary: Enjoyable (Not Waugh's Best)
Review: Although this isn't Waugh's best (try DECLINE AND FALL or A HANDFUL OF DUST, or even the underappreciated THE ORDEAL OF GILBERT PINFOLD) it is still very good. A note: from one comment I'm guessing the horde of Calif. reviewers were schoolkids reading this for an assignment, and aged around 15. Probably NOT the best audience for the book--they need to grow a little older and closer to death... The fact that some appreciated it is actually heartening.
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Summary: A Pungent Piece of Satire
Review: I really don't know what else to say except that The Loved One is cover-to-cover the sharpest satire I have ever read, filled with tongue-in-cheek plot lines and caricatures rather than characters. That anyone could take the death industry and make it seem so self-important and as normal as something like the automobile industry is sheer brilliance. At less than 200 pages, it's a one day read and a very funny one at that. The only conclusion that can be drawn from it is that Waugh probably didn't enjoy his tenure in Hollywood very much, which may be the biggest understatement I could make.
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Summary: This book will truly amaze you in many ways
Review: I am a senior in highschool- not for long (4 days left! ) and I chose this book as my finale work to finish up my year in AP English- I had no idea what I was getting into. I read this entire book in one sitting- the complexity of the story forced me to turn the pages. The first few pages are a little hard to follow, but the book grabs your attention with its odd subject matter of pet cemetarys and beuticians for the dead. This book is truly a work that must be read by anyone who wants to understand satire from all angles. I recommend it to you, but beware of its perverted absurdity.
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Summary: A Little Dream-Noir
Review: Evelyn Waugh's THE LOVED ONE is a strange and amusing little book, and as he says himself in a prefatory note entitled "A Warning," it is, "a little nightmare produced by the unaccustomed high living of a brief visit to Hollywood." Dennis Barlow is a one-hit-wonder poet and failed screenwriter forced to take a job selling and effecting pet cremations and funerals at an establishment called the Happier Hunting Ground. Doing so cuts him off form the snobbish Cricket Clubbers of expatriate English society in L.A.--they would much rather pay to send him back to the motherland than have him disgrace them by association. Waugh also takes several good cuts at the vacuity of American life as exemplified by the heartless film industry and the garish tackiness of the Whispering Glades cemetery (complete with piped in sounds of nature)--a place of rest found enduringly beautiful by Barlow's love interest Aimee Thanatogenos. This mortuary cosmetician's name translates roughly as 'The Loved One, who gives Life to Death. No need for subtlety here as far as Waugh is concerned--this is Tinseltown, after all. More fun names: the virtuoso mortician also in love with Aimee is "Joyboy" and the advice columnist at the local paper who replies to her several entreaties is "Mr. Slump." The characters don't offer much to redeem themselves, but that's the point, and Waugh doesn't waste any pages getting it across. Whether you have gone through the process of making funeral arrangements or not, THE LOVED ONE will prepare you for the sales pitch of "Before Need Arrangements" and various other details you weren't crazy about knowing but that are dealt with in such a funny, hyperbolized way here by Waugh. "A Warning" recommends that "squeamish [readers] should return their copies to the library or bookstore unread." What a silly thing to do that would be.
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