Books: A Knife in the Jocular Vein

THE LOVED ONE (164 pp.)— Evelyn Waugh—Little, Brown ($2.50).

"Of course, parts of Brideshead are wicked, really wicked. But does one have the feeling that Evelyn Waugh himself is wicked enough?"

In a dingy Manhattan bar, some members of the Waugh cult were measuring out their lives with swizzle sticks. They had been badly shaken by Brideshead Revisited (TIME, Jan. 7, 1946). Unlike Waugh's earlier novels, its irony had not been outrageously funny, and the typical Waugh mood, bright, pardlike and impermeable, had been clouded by a sweat of nostalgic and religious dither. Worse still,...