The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy

Evelyn Waugh is my guilty pleasure. His books are like candy, they are so easy to read. But if they are candy, they are lemon drops coated with arsenic. Waugh's bitter, sarcastic, and completely devastating portraits of humanity warm my heart. His characters destroy each other's lives so casually, and I love it.

In The Loved One, Waugh takes on L.A. British neocolonial snobbery in post-war Southern California, set in a Disneyesque funeral home (actually a “memorial park”) and a much less classy pet cemetery (“The Happier Hunting Ground”): how much better can life be?