Vile Bodies

World War I is over, and a new generation comes onto the scene. The “Youth of the Twenties” spends its days in tireless pursuit of society pleasures. With a paradoxical blend of unforced simplicity and refined sophistication, they test their inventive minds on new whims and adventures.

Evelyn Waugh’s book is a funny, poisonous, and audacious satire that reveals, under the sparkling glossy veneer of high society, a gaping dark emptiness. The author is merciless: this “wretched flesh” spends life maintaining a glittering façade of a thoroughly false, cheerful little world—where they try to hide from memories of the horrors of the last war and prevent any foreboding horrors of what is coming from seeping through.

The novel was published in 1930, but the next war is predicted and inevitable in it, and against that backdrop the heroes—like the denizens of Looking-Glass Land from the epigraph “Wretched Flesh”—are especially desperate in their flight, only “so as to remain in the very same place.”