It feels somewhat ridiculous to review a book this old, but let's do it! In the late 40s, Waugh allowed himself be wooed by Hollywood, largely so his family could on holiday to California. They wanted to make a movie of Brideshead Revisited; he knew they had no idea what it was about. (Brideshead wouldn't be put to celluloid until 1981, with a BBC miniseries starting Jeremy Irons (!) which won a raft of BAFTAs.) During his time in the States, he began writing what would become The Loved One, a send up of Hollywood which features a pet cemetery. I mean, why not.

The Loved One is fine, but I feel like Waugh is the kind of writer whose incisiveness suffers when he gets too far afield. His goosing of Americans feels kind of stupid, and not lazy so much as smug. The names are actively cringe-inducing -- such as one Amiee Thanatogenos, whose last name, if I'm not mistaken, means "death born". (Dumb names are a convention of a certain species of British satire though, so this isn't a real pertinent criticism.) There are love triangles and funerals for housepets, Americans who can't recognize major British poetry, and silly Hollywood people. Waugh is best when he's putting his British characters through the paces though. He's not immersed enough in American culture to truly satirize it.

This is a maybe frivolous analogy, but when JK Rowling wrote about the wizarding world in Britain, and by extension the British class and education systems, she produced a cultural juggernaut which defined a whole generation. When she moved to writing about the wizarding world in America, she produced a mess. She never addresses meaningfully race in America, which is a fatal lacuna. Calling the partition of the wizarding world from the muggle world "segregation" trivializes the experience of African Americans under Jim Crow. She wants magic to be a metaphor for race, but coding race that way -- in a world with real racial divides -- is facile. Uh, it looks like I maybe had a little rampage there, and getting back to my point: Waugh's form of typically British humor wilts when it comes over the pond. (But, I should add, is nowhere near as terrible as Rowling.)

Anyway, fun little book, not one of Waugh's best or anything, but diverting and loose.