October 2016 Discussion: The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh (spoilers)
 

The time has come to discuss the October 2016 MobileRead Book Club selection, The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy by Evelyn Waugh. What did you think?

Sorry, folks, I need to bow out this month. I simply haven't had time. "Life" has intruded, and I've been only listening to books while sitting on buses or the Canada Line train.

Will try for next month.

I did not find The Loved One to be funny at all. It was a chore to get though it. I rated it 1 star on Goodreads. The only saving grace is the length. By the time I got to a point where I would normally have given up, I didn't have too much left to go so I persevered in case it got any better. It didn't.

Dennie Barlow was a momma's boy type. If his mother was living with him in the US and she owned a house, Dennis would be living in her basement.

Aimée Thanatogenos was a confused girl who had no idea what she wanted.

Mr. Joyboy was a mamma's boy and not all that nice.

The advice column team were worthless. They couldn't give advice on how to get out of a wet paper bag.

The rest were just fluff.

I'm afraid Jon speaks for me on this one. After the first couple of chapters the book at least became more coherent, but not in the least more humorous. I couldn't even understand why the advice columnist team were even in the book.

The advice columnist team were in the book Aimée could have a reason to kill herself. It was all a lot far-fetched.

The book had no redeeming quality. The first chapter was confusing. The rest boring.

Please read The Loved One. Misery loves company. :rolleyes:

Perhaps the clumsiest plot device in history, and one of the most unnecessary.

The entire book was a clumsy plot device.

This is one of my favoritest, funniest books ever, going back for decades. I remember making a pilgrimage to Forest Lawn cemetery with a college friend who also loved it, and we kept quoting all the verses to rack other and laughing our heads off as we discovered that it was exactly as Waugh portrayed.

When I read Jon's first post, I thought I might have misrembered it and that it was slow to get going. Instead, I was charmed, again, from the earliest pages and it rapidly proceeded to outright hilarity. How can you help laughing at the Happier Hunting Ground?

It's bad timing for me this evening, but I'll post at more length tomorrow. I just don't want people to be discouraged from giving it a try.

ETA: It's on the Telegraph's list of 15 best comedy novels and the Guardian's list of 1000 must reads.

i wish there were an Audible version. I would try it. But right now, if it isn't audible, I haven't got time...

I would also point out that humour is a very difficult subject just because it works differently for different people coming from different shared experiences and cultures and is absolutely the hardest to get to cross that cultural divide. Some of us, for example, find Midnight Riot/Rivers of London funny. Others do NOT. Clearly, there's a difference here with this book. Makes me want to read it if only to see where it hits me.

ETA: And suddenly, there IS an Audible version of it. OK, mouth make promises...

I'll start on it over the weekend.

Started, about an hour into it. Actually quite enjoying it. It's amusing, but not funny yet, if you know what I mean. The narration is by Simon Prebble and it's a good fit.

I would like to know just what bits you found funny. I didn't find any of it funny. It read as a strained attempt to be funny that fell flat. The fact that some of the characters are British didn't help. It's got none of the British humor that makes some British comedy funny. I didn't see what was funny about the pet cemetery. All I took from it was that pet cemeteries are the low end of the death business.

I read this a number of years ago. While I did find a few scenes modestly "funny", it is not in any way a comedy. This is written as rather biting satire on "the American way of death" and of Forest Lawn in particular. If you are not familiar with Forest Lawn, either from visiting it or reading about it in detail (I have a "brochure" from The Loved One's time period thats around 11"x14", bound, and around 20 pages) you'll miss much of the book's point. Overall, I enjoyed the book.

Excellent analysis. And from Evelyn Waugh's British perspective. To me loaded with British dry humor. Obviously not for everyone.

I find myself agreeing with the mixed reviews as far as concluding that humor is a difficult category to make most happy.

Other than issybird, does anyone find this funny with real laughs?

Working a lot of overtime the past couple of weeks so I didn't get a chance to re-read this. But I remember enjoying it when we read it in high school and when I re-read it in the 90s.
I remember it being funny though in a different way than some of the more jokey authors who are funny for the sake of being funny.

Also there's the movie version with Robert Morse, Rod Steiger, Jonathan Winters and Liberace and I'm sure my memories of the book and movie are somewhat mixed together.

I'll respond briefly with a gross generalization that there are two kinds of British comedy, the over-the-top slapsticky stuff that I don't find funny at all and the dry understated stuff which is my favorite form of humor.

So I'm agreeing with the consensus that humor is difficult and personal. I also think this appeals to me because my favorite literary period is Britain between the wars, which was Waugh's apotheosis. I have no objection to mocking American excess and what gives this additional savour is that it's tinged with bitterness, both from the British perspective of a nation that's ceded the top position to its crasser cousin and from Waugh's as an artist who was on the downslope. He was a bitter man who didn't adjust well to the post-war world.

Yes, me. Sort of. I found occasional good joke laughs, but for the most part as dwig observed a low chuckle satire of what Waugh observed when in LA at the time. Then I seldom find books to be laugh out loud funny. Trying to think of one all that comes to my mind immediately would be A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. If you are familiar with that book I'll eagerly await your proof of it's lack of humor.

You did not find this at all funny. We've got it. What I read of Midnight Riot I did not even understand why it was in this category. Moving on.



Because the humor was about death and the way it was treated in that location and time? People had to die right and left to do that. Also mocking the whole idea of such an advice column?

I didn't like the way the advice column team was written. The one guy who answered the letters was just crass.

You're not meant to like them.

OK, I"m about 2/3rds through, and I certainly see why the divergent views. Is it funny? Well, yeah. It is. Not slapstick funny, not Monty Python funny, and not even Jonathan Winters funny (though I can definitely seem him in a film version of this.) But dry, British, rather bitter funny. This is satire, certainly. But I'm enjoying it, and am ultimately glad we're reading it. (Though I still have trouble understanding how anyone can read even just the first chapter of Midnight Riot and not know why I thought it belonged here.)

Context:

I appreciate dry British humor and I get it in the book, but I didn't really like this book which was a surprise to me. Perhaps it was the subject matter? I'm not sure. Maybe it would have been better to have listened to the audiobook. I do like the characterization as more "amusing" than laugh-out-loud funny.

However, the main reason I am posting is to say that if you didn't like this book and it's the only Waugh that you have read, then I encourage you to try something else. You might find it funnier. For example, earlier this year I read Scoop which is a satire of journalism and foreign-war correspondents. I thought that book was much more entertaining than this one. So please don't give up on Waugh based on this book alone.

When I read older books, I like to seek out reviews or criticisms near that time period. Here are two that I thought that were particularly interesting.

Evelyn Waugh: The Best and The Worst, October 1954
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs...54oct/rolo.htm
New York Times Review, June 1948
https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/...ugh-loved.html

I do think that listening helped. I'm not sure I'd have enjoyed it as much just reading it.

In the interest of not outing your spoiler . . .

It wasn't any of those factors; it just didn't grab me. And, yes, I like dry humor. I would like to see the film sometime to see if perhaps the cinematic version might bring out things I missed in my reading. I certainly found nothing offensive about using the topic of death as the centerpiece for a humorous work, if that's what you're asking; I just didn't find this particular book funny. Maybe were I to read it at a later date in a different frame of mind my opinion would be different, but all I can say now is I didn't find it amusing.

I found several levels of humor in this. In addition to the overall satire, there really were laugh out loud moments for me. Joyboy getting an annual card that Aimée is wagging her tail in heaven, the Dreamer and his church without walls, Sambo's little parrot head reposing on a pillow in a tiny casket - I could go on.

And Waugh's prose is continually a joy. One could take paragraphs to discuss everything happening in those two sentences, but it's just plain funny on the face of it, too.

Sure I can understand that. It certainly goes to the point that this category has problems. One person's humor falls flat for another person. I've been around long enough to know that this problem is not new for the humor category, but more like a consistent feature.

I can understand some people finding a book funnier than others. But it's one thing for some to not find it funny at all and instead finding it a chore to read.

But that would apply to your nomination as well, Jon.

In Waugh's defence, I'll add that he's considered one of the great English prose stylists of the 20th century. That doesn't mean you're going to like him, of course, but it means many people do.

Maybe it's just this specific book. Maybe he has others that would have been a better read.

No, that's always the issue with humour. It's culturally dependent and subject to all sorts of vagaries. I have no expectation that everyone would find this book funny. I find it somewhat funny, but a shade too bitter for me to think it's really funny.

I read this 50 years ago, and thought that it was fairly funny then. On a re-read, I think that it is brilliant satire, of a very dark and bitter kind - for example, Barlow looking for something by his suicide roommate Sir Francis Hinsley for the memorial service, and finding only the book review, and the verse fragment when Barlow tries to write a poem for the service.

I don't think that this is something anyone should read if they want some light comedic relief.

:thumbsup: