This is a satiric and a dark humored novel; it's very well written, but I found it hard to laugh at the characters, sensing more to their misery then I did of the humor of industrialized and specialized funerals for the well-to-do or the artist. I can only say that you should read it.

Evelyn Waugh was a rebel.

In the novel, a young English poet, Dennis Barlow, goes to Los Angeles to live with his uncle, Sir Francis Hinsley, who works at a film studio. When he is fired by the studio, Sir Francis commits suicide, and Dennis goes to the imposing necropolis called Whispering Glades to arrange for the funeral. While there, he meets Aimee Thanatogenos, a cosmetician, and competes for her attention with the sinister embalmer Mr. Joyboy.

This book is a classic in dark humor. A fast and funny read.

Still Recommend.

Evelyn Waugh was a rebel.

In the novel, a young English poet, Dennis Barlow, goes to Los Angeles to live with his uncle, Sir Francis Hinsley, who works at a film studio. When he is fired by the studio, Sir Francis commits suicide, and Dennis goes to the imposing necropolis called Whispering Glades to arrange for the funeral. While there, he meets Aimee Thanatogenos, a cosmetician, and competes for her attention with the sinister embalmer Mr. Joyboy.

This book is a classic in dark humor. A fast and funny read.

Still Recommend.

Had a hard time finding this book to read for my bookclub. found it paid a penny(more for shipping than book) Well worth it as I didnt have to struggle to find and the book was in great shape. Once again amazon and its suppliers come through like champs.

It would seem preparation for funeral services would be a difficult service for which to create a farce. Evelyn Waugh takes this uncomfortable profession to a different dimension by exploring it through a love triangle. Readers are certain to smile at the mundane situations the characters have created for themselves.

The aptly named Mr. Joyboy is in love with his work as well as Aimee. In Hollywood he is at the top of his profession, preparing Hollywood's greats for their final performance. But when aspiring poet Dennis Barlow enters the picture with his borrowed poetry, it creates an ever-shifting dilemma in the mind of Aimee. Quite literally, it is a dilemma she is never able to reconcile.

At times, I found myself unsure if it was acceptable to find certain portions of "The Loved One" funny because of the context of the humor. The tone set by Waugh seems too serious to be attempting humor. It is only in the big picture that one can see the humor in the proper perspective.

In the past year I have gone back to this book
and discovered it influenced my choice of a career in Funeral Service. This is true entertainment on the funeral industry. This book is quite prophetic. This year I attended a lecture for Funeral Directors on Pet Cemeteries. I immediately recalled this book and the Pet Cemetery: "The Happy Hunting Ground" a fictional employer mentioned in these pages. In reflection of my years of funeral service I many times saw LOVE TRIANGLES. The human side of me found me inclined to participate in such excitement. Lucky for me I resisted. So the love triangle thing is timeless! I found this work to be quite fun the second time around as I first read it in the 1970's, a time when few women were in funeral service. If you are not familiar with funeral service the role of embalmer,
poet and cosmetologist, continue to this day. This will live on for many more years. These pages are still current today. Be forewarned, the work is a brutal introduction in the details of what goes on in the Funeral Home.
Funeral Directors should find this book particularly funny. If you have ever been in funeral service please purchase this book and be entertained.

While "The Loved One" was amusing enough and stylistically attractive, I just wasn't that impressed with it. The characters all seemed a bit too faded and pigeon-holed, and had no real personalities to speak of. While the premise had the capacity for great drama and/or comedy, instead there was a rather pallid combination of the two.

Joyboy was an entirely creepy personage, whose mannerisms and speech made my skin crawl, which I'm not entirely sure was the intent. Aimée was a whiny, indecisive little brat, and at times, I wanted to slap her. Dennis Barlow started out as a wholly sympathetic character, but midway through the story, Waugh turned him into an insensitive jerk with no redeeming qualities. I was jarred from the story by the abrupt change, and couldn't become interested in it again, no matter what happened next.

The twist ending was pretty much anticipated and very disappointing. I suspect that I generally tend to be disappointed by "great" writers, because I expect their work to have an indescribable *something* that other books don't have. Either way, "The Loved One" was okay, but it wasn't fantastic.

I've had this book on my shelves for years and re-read it yesterday. Found it delightful and laughed out loud at some things.

I was confused by the mention of "HAL" in the first sentence as given on this site. There is no one named Hal in the story. Then I saw the problem. I have a Vintage Books edition where the first words of a chapter are in caps. The last word of the first sentence is "HAD". Part of the letter D has been cut off as has part of an e at the end of the second line.

Back to the story. Descriptions of funeral homes for people and pets are so good. I loved the little notes that Dennis sent about pets being in heaven and wagging their tails.

The Loved One is classic Waugh. Thought provoking, rather irrevent and good for an afternoon's belly laugh. If you enjoyed The Loved One you will also enjoy "SCOOP" and "Black Mischief".

At Whispering Glades funeral home, Loved Ones is the term used to refer to the deceased. My Joyboy, a foolish, weak-willed embalmer, prepares the bodies for viewing by the Waiting Ones, the relatives and friends of the Loved Ones. Miss Aimýe Thanatogenos, the appropriately named make-up artist at Whispering Glades, is young, innocent and foolish. Mr Joyboy carefully composes the faces of the Loved Ones so that they smile for her when it is time to put their make-up on. Aimýe blushes and generally acts as though her head is made of air.

Dennis Barlow is a struggling poet and works as a pets' mortician. He has recently suffered the death of his uncle and house-mate, Sir Francis Hinsley, who committed suicide following his dismissal at a Hollywood studio. Barlow visits Whispering Glades, where Aimýe leads him through the funeral process. He is impressed, both with the young Aimýe, but also with the care and expense shown to the Loved Ones at Whispering Glades. It is a far height above the casual dumping into furnaces that makes up the majority of his own mortician's work.

Waugh writes with a cynical hand. At times, the text strays into near-parody, it is so caustic and contemptuous of the characters and situations presented. But there is enough wit and sharp insight to make the novel enjoyable. The dialogue in particular crackles, with sly British humour inserted alongside blatant parody of American language. Barlow is given the greatest lines - as a hopeful poet, he comes across as knowledgeable in the face of the grand American ignorance of poetry and culture, embodied subtlety within Aimýe, and more openly in the blubbering of Mr Joyboy. There is a sense that we are in on the joke with Barlow, which may prove uncomfortable for American readers, as the Americans in the novel are without fail stupid, greedy, shallow and uncultured.

The funeral industry is something that we shall all, in one way or another, come into contact with. One can only hope that it will be at a late stage in our life, but at places like Whispering Glades, children are cared for with as much loving attention as the elderly. Waugh's sharpest insight is showing the ways in which the bereaved are persuaded into outlaying huge amounts for their deceased relatives. Yes, an appropriate and tasteful funeral certainly provides closure and allows for a certain aesthetic and emotional sensibility at a difficult time, but there is no question that some of the grander options for funerals run to the excessive. Waugh captures this almost parasitic end of the industry successfully, with Whispering Glades providing services that range from ordinary all the way up to sarcophagi and private mausoleums.

Waugh's jokes tend to the subtle when it comes to dialogue, and the savage when it comes to plot. Clever lines are so smoothly inserted that an inattentive reader may miss them: 'We usually recommend the casked half-exposure for gentlemen because the legs never look so well.' But the larger parodies of plot are easier to spot. Throughout the novel, Aimýe is torn between her love for Barlow and her desire for career advancement through Mr Joyboy, which prompts her to write a series of purple letters to the Guru Brahmin, a conglomerate of 'two gloomy men and a bright young secretary', who share the workload of the Guru's newspaper column. Aimýe, of course, believes that the Guru is a wise man from India, one who is more than capable of helping her choose the right man. We know the joke's on her, but we are also able to raise the satire to a higher level, in realising that, while she helps relieve grieving relatives of their money, outside of work she is capable of being all but swindled by an imaginary Guru.

An easy criticism of the novel is that none of the characters are particularly likable. Aimýe is naive and hopelessly shallow, while Mr Joyboy is ridiculous and far too much of a mother's boy. Barlow is the most sympathetic of the characters, but only because we are amused by his caustic wit. Take that away, and he is as unappealing as the others. But the novel exists as a satire, not a character study, and it is there where it succeeds. The funeral industry is as ripe as any other for savaging, and Waugh more than rises to the challenge.

The ending to the novel is an incredibly neat fit. Too neat to be anything but contrived, though again, this works because of the novel's intention. The ending is foreshadowed on almost every page, and if that isn't enough, Aimýe's name gives the game away. While it does wrap up a little too neatly for Barlow, the novel ends in the way that a novel satirical of the funeral industry must. The Loved Ones is short, funny and very sharp.

This marvelous satire looks at contemporary life in Hollywood and sees at its root the absence of a widely diffused, generally understood, high-minded code of manners. Instead, everybody or at best everybody's narrow tribe is its own carver. Consequently, and hilariously, we see installed in highest place the values of Whispering Glades, or those of the Happier Hunting Ground, or of the ungrateful Hollywood studio executives, or of the toadying British expat "community." To the gimlet-eyed Waugh, this rampant subjectivism is not true freedom but a kind of modern wandering in the dark. Such a dour vision, though, becomes the source for his high spirited, wonderfully heartless comedy.

In this brilliant little satirical novel, Evelyn Waugh takes on Hollywood, the British expatriate community in Los Angeles, the death care industry, romantic love, filial love, sexism (perhaps without knowing it), and American attitudes toward success, death, foreigners, art, their pets, suicide, morality, newspaper advice columns, and religion (both ancient and new-fangled). No tombstone goes unturned. Rather than summarize the plot, let me just say that the title of the book, which is an obvious reference to the standard funteral director's euphemism for a deceased person, actually takes on another meaning as well, especially as the two main male characters (Dennis Barlow, an British would-be poet newly arrived to Los Angeles, and Mr. Joyboy, a successful local embalmer) vie for the affections of the same young lady, Aimee Thanatogenos. The novel could be seen on one level as the story of her journey from being the men's love object (desired, but never really "seen") to becoming a "loved one" in the death care industry sense of the word.

At the same time I was reading the book, I rented Tony Richardson's marvelous all-star film (1965). Both are equally wicked and satirical, but Richardson's film, in its exploitation of American anxieties about nuclear war, has more in common with Stanley Kubric's "Dr. Strangelove" than with Waugh's 1948 novel. In any case, seeing the movie didn't spoil the ending of the book. Both are brilliant and LOL fun.

Evelyn Waugh is considered, with Vladimir Nabokov and John Updike, one of the supreme stylists of the English language of the last 100 years. In The Loved One, a long short story posing as a novella, he takes his eloquent style and pits it against a scabrous Hollywood backdrop, rife with hustlers, health freaks, narcissistic actors, ruthless producers, a vast wasteland of moral bankruptcy. The protagonist, Dennis Barlow, is a British poet, who lauded with literary awards in England, moves to Hollywood to make it as a screenwriter. His first project is to write about the life of the poet Shelley but alas the film project doesn't catapult him into Hollywood fame. To the contrary, his imbecilic screenplay outcasts him from the industry so that he has to work at a pet mortuary. When his older friend and once successful screenwriter Sir Francis, also a British ex-patriate, is fired from his writing job and kills himself, Dennis must make funeral arrangments at Whispering Glades where he meets and falls in love with a mentally imbalanced mortuary cosmetician, Aimee Thanatogenos. The woman in turn is in love with the creepy embalmer known as Mr. Lovejoy. Barlow resorts to plagiarizing classic poetry to win her heart with disastrous consequences.

All of this ludicrous plot is just a vehicle for Waugh's misanthropic depiction of Hollywood. This is savage satire not for the faint of heart. Mercifully, Waugh ends his jaded novel at less than a 170 pages.

If you're new to Waugh, you might start with his masterpiece A Handful of Dust.