FFB: THE LOVED ONE by Evelyn Waugh and some other Funny Books...

The contemporary Dell paperback (the
 edition I read) w/Chas. Addams cover.

I've been reading about humor and satire recently, sometimes a dull and infrequently a dangerous thing, and it occurred to me how many genuinely or reasonably good and how many rather tired or otherwise not so good humorous novels I've read over the decades...among those aimed at adults, the most thoroughly successful I remember off the top would be the novella The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh's jaundiced look at Los Angeles and the primary industry in the city, also the funeral industry (and its offshoots) and the British expatriate colony that clustered around the entertainment establishment in a vaguely marking-time way at the turn of the '60s. I've yet to see the entirety of the film version, but the novella was more than sufficient for anyone's purposes, right up to the biggest laugh-line in the book, a grim little joke to cap the rest assembled here. Brevity, soul of wit, and all, though certainly there is no lack of long, funny novels...it's simply easier to sustain a consistent tone, particularly of black comedy much as with its cousins horror and suspense fiction, in the shorter lengths (and this novella can remind one, particularly in retrospect, of another contemporary short novel with ultraviolet humor and even a certain amount of similar undertaking within, Robert Bloch's Psycho). A light touch never hurts...Waugh wouldn't dream of making matters any more blatant than he needs to, though of course the grotesquery of much of what he's dealing with here takes care of that for him...which is part of why I enjoyed this novella so much and found very little to stir enthusiasm in, for example, the blatant and unsubtle pity-success, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, which novel was never content to simply squirt water from a plastic lapel flower if it could hit you with an oversized powder puff as well. The residue was palpable. 

Likewise, as I recall some of the less successful humorous novels of the past decades, sometimes the invention or motivation simply flags, and one is left with the mildly amusing (Art Buchwald's Irving's Delight was meant to be as scathing of the advertising and, in another odd kinship with the Waugh, the pet food industries and related matters as the Waugh was in its compass, but Buchwald was rarely too prone to go for the jugular, hence probably both the popularity of his column and the obscurity most of his work, very much including this novel, has fallen into since his death; Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth had far less restraint, and so their The Space Merchants has at least a good-sized if infrequently-heard-from cult following, and such similar work from them as Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons" can be utterly plagiarized for other cult-followed items as the Mike Judge film Idiocracy). It's not as if the models for the likes of Buchwald or Erma Bombeck weren't at times at least as outraged or at least as amused as Waugh...think of Jean Kerr's parody of Mike Hammer (and of the Dramatic Reading) collected in her breakthrough volume Please Don't Eat the Daisies (though, sadly, her corrosive mockery there isn't what she's remembered for), or Robert Benchley at his most enervated. 

Ah, well. I'll have more (and probably better) to say about a number of these and perhaps some more over the next several weeks (I really should be talking about Bruce Jay Friedman here, if not also the Angry Young Men and Heller and Thurber and Ms. Parker and Twain...). And I see Bill Crider was inspired by an old review of mine to look up Nelson Algren's anthology...I'm honored. Better essays and reviews by Bill and others are linkable at Patti Abbott's blog today...

The Library of America version.