The Loved One - John Lennon

The writing business Evelyn Waugh knows probably isn’t much different than the music business I know. Everybody loves you for one thing: your money. Literature, music, and here in Waugh’s novel “The Loved One,” even death is all too commercial. The money, the pressure and all the craziness pushes at you from all sides until you have to completely humiliate yourself to be what people want you to be.

In “ The Loved One,” Evelyn Waugh pushes back at all the money grubbers and phonies. His story takes place in L.A. in the forties. He writes of English ex patriots that have come to Hollywood to work in the film industry, and he writes of Americans that work in funeral parlors and cemeteries. In his novel, these two worlds collide, and whether the characters are British or American, all of them are fakes. Their sentiments are shallow and/or selfish. Just about the only people who are sincere and truthful in this novel are already dead and being prepped for a funeral.

I probably read this book on my own. I like books with unexpected endings, and this author is famous for going against tired formula. Just when you think you are getting into a serious romance, you'll get totally surpised. This book is sick and hilarious. I love it for both reasons.

The main character Dennis is a young English poet who has come to L.A. with the hopes of writing screenplays, but the only job he can find is writing condolence cards at pet semetary. Good! He gets his shot of reality really quick. His roommate, a fairly successful screenwriter, doesn’t receive his wake-up call until it’s too late. After twelve years of working for the same company, he is unceremoniously fired. No one even bothers to tell him. One afternoon, early in the novel, Dennis returns to their apartment to see his dejected roommate hanging by his neck from the rafters. That’ s sick, but I suppose the most disturbing aspect of this suicide is that it disturbs Dennis very little. From the people he’s met, and the things he has seen, this is par for the course in L.A. When Dennis is obligated to take care of the body, he appears to have all the feeling and compassion of the corpse itself.

I love this novel because Waugh gives us a character in Dennis that both attracts us and disgusts us. In the process of disposing of his roommates body, Dennis falls in love with a young woman who works at the mortuary. Wow! I suppose you have to have an insane amount of romance in your heart if you can lock in on a woman without being distracted by the image of dead bodies and the smell of embalming fluid. This guy Dennis just doesn’t care. What follows is the strangest love story that you will ever read. You will want to root for the guy, even though you know it’s going to end in a disaster. Someone is going to get burned (ha ha).

Peace,

John