Vile Bodies (1930)

Vile bodies, vile people, vile attitudes, only they could have named themselves 'bright young things'. Good book, Evelyn Waugh knows his own kind but also knows how to send them up. ( )

"Our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the saviour...Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself."
Philipians 3:17-21

This book snuck up on me. It's really fun and quick to read - satirical and absurdist - and suddenly toward the end I started to think that maybe it's not a little but quite a bit deeper than it looks. I'm going to have to put some thought into it - and I'm loaning it to Diane at work, maybe she'll help me sort it all out. It's at least very good; it might be wicked good.

That ending is quite an "Oh shit!" moment. Very nicely done.

Other random notes:
- A quote that comes up a lot in discussion of this book, from Waugh: "Psychology - there isn't such a thing. I regard writing not as investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech and events that interest me." That seems accurate. There isn't any overt psychological description. I did find the central romance between Adam and Nina interesting: for all their blaséness, they seem to be legitimately in love. And I think they're quite aware of it; while they never say a thing to each other that isn't drenched in detached irony, I think they know they're really sincere. It's not as clear to us, through most of the book.

Waugh was staunchly against psychological investigation of characters: "All characters are flat. All a writer can do is give more or less information about a character, not information of a different order." Which is a bewilderingly assheaded thing to say; he was apparently bitching about modern writers like Woolf and Joyce, but hadn't he read Eliot or Tolstoy? Jeez.

- This terrific (although long and somewhat stuffy) essay argues for Vile Bodies as a parody of a traditional romance novel. The traditional plot involves a young man in love but deemed unworthy of the woman, often for economic or social reasons; he acquires a fortune or suddenly discovers he's actually the son of a baron or something and the plot ends in marriage. (You know, like a Shakespeare comedy or Tom Jones.) Here, Adam is constantly in pursuit of that fortune - represented by the drunk Major - but like the Jarndyce settlement in [b:Bleak House,|31242|Bleak House|Charles Dickens|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1280113147s/31242.jpg|2960365] when it finally arrives it's completely devalued, and the book ends in one final display of pointless extravagance as the world ends.

- I love Waugh's use of -making, as in, "This cab ride is terribly sober-making." Totally gonna start using that.

- Apparently many of these characters were thinly-veiled portraits of Waugh's actual acquaintances, and it was a big thing to rush out and get his books and try to figure out who was who. And when some of the satires got a little too pointed, Waugh got invited to fewer parties. (Somewhat like the Chatterbox series of incidents.)

- To what extent is Waugh indebted to Wilde?

- Let's try to get through this without making any Paris Hilton references, shall we? It would be ever so bored-making. ( )

A brilliant satire of the lives of the "bright young things" in between-the-wars London. This book is laugh out loud funny - published in 1930 around the time that Waugh was accepted into the Catholic Church, it is making a comment about living a life where the only point is to have fun - but it is possible to ignore the social commentary and just laugh at the ridiculous characters and the situations they get themselves into. The writing is exquisite - Waugh was a genius! ( )

This is a book about class and frivolity. It is a satire on each that cannot quite hide its deep love for both. It has the sun-dappled loveliness of Wodehouse mixed in with the scabrous and forensic insights of Jonathan Swift. The ending undercuts what went before to just the right degree. I felt somewhat uncomfortable with the author's class view. The upper classes are condemned but also admired for their frivolity while the working classes tend to be largely condemned merely for being lumpen and unclean in various ways. I felt also that the characters were being satirised from a Catholic viewpoint. Their behaviour was worthy of satire because it was sinful, and sinful only because they acted without thought for consequence in the eyes of God and no more or less reason than that. On the whole, I prefer my satire more secular, like, guvner. ( )

Soirées masquées, soirées sauvages, soirées victoriennes, soirées grecques, soirées cow-boys, soirées russes, soirées où il fallait se déguiser en quelqu'un d'autre, réceptions presque nudistes dans les quartiers de Saint-John Wood, réceptions dans des appartements, dans des studios, dans des maisons, dans des hôtels, des bateaux et des boîtes de nuit, dans des moulins à vent et dans des piscines ; ternes bals de Londres, bals comiques d'Écosse, bals ignobles de Paris, toute cette succession et cette répétition d'humanité agglomérée... Ces corps vils...