Waugh’s Last Cruel Novel

Edmund Wilson argued that there were two Evelyn Waughs: the great comic genius of his early novels—Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), Scoop (1938)—and the religiously obsessed author of Brideshead Revisited (1945), whose success made Waugh internationally famous and in Wilson’s view no longer interesting. But just three years after Brideshead, Waugh returned to his first theme in what is perhaps the bitterest yet one of the funniest of his comic works: The Loved One (1948).