00:08 Frank Hello, and welcome to Novel Conversations, a podcast about the world's greatest stories. I'm your host, Frank Lovallo, and for each episode of Novel Conversations, I talk to two readers about one book. And together, we summarize the story for you, we introduce you to the characters, and we tell you what happens to them. and we read from the book along the way. So, if you love hearing a good story, you're in the right place. This episode's conversation is about the novel, The Loved One, by Evelyn Waugh. And I'm joined by our Novel Conversations readers, Elizabeth Flood and Katie Smith. Elizabeth, Katie, welcome.

00:39 Katie Thank you, Frank. Thanks, Frank. Glad to be here.

00:42 Frank Glad to have you both here with me. Before we start our conversation, I want to give a quick introduction to our novel. Published in 1948, Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One is a pitiless satire on the shallowness and pretensions of British expatriates and Americans in post-World War II Los Angeles. Set in 1940s Hollywood, Waugh portrays the citizens of Los Angeles as part of a culture that fosters and encourages the selfish pursuit of petty goals. Almost everyone is striving to gain or maintain a place in society that they seem to believe is important because other people might envy them for it. The Loved One is a mordant satire on British expatriates, the pomp and pretense of the Hollywood film industry, and the cruel commercialism of the American funerary business. Elizabeth, I said that the story is about British expatriates living in Los Angeles and working in Hollywood after World War II or its aftermath. We quickly meet three of them. Let's start with a principal character, Dennis Barlow.

01:37 Elizabeth A young English poet named Dennis Barlow, who is a screenwriter, who just has left his job at Megalopolitan Studios, which he hates for its bureaucracy and lack of imagination. He takes a job at a pet cemetery, scandalizing his fellow Englishmen in Hollywood.

01:55 Frank Did he leave his job?

01:57 Elizabeth Well, he lost his contract with the studio, so he was fired.

02:02 Frank And Katie, Dennis Barlow has a roommate.

02:04 Katie He does. Francis Hinsley. He is a publicist at the same studio where Barlow worked.

02:10 Frank And we soon learned things aren't going very well for him at the studio either.

02:14 Katie Not right now, no. He has been tasked with rebranding the screen idol Juanita del Pablo from a Spanish actress to an Irish actress. And the job proves too difficult for Hinsley.

02:29 Frank Right. He has to take a well-known Spanish movie star and make her over into an Irish lass.

02:34 Katie New look, new accent, and they're trying on new names.

02:38 Frank And then we meet our third expat, Ambrose Abercrombie. He's come to their house.

02:42 Elizabeth British thespian Sir Ambrose Abercrombie visits the house of Barlow and Francis Hensley.

02:49 Katie As with Sir Ambrose, they call Hensley Sir Francis, Sir Francis Hensley.

02:55 Elizabeth He has heard Barlow has taken a position at happier hunting grounds. a cemetery and funeral parlor for deceased pets. Abercrombie expresses his dismay, declaring such a job reflects poorly on the British community back home.

03:11 Katie And he believes that the expatriate British have a reputation and an image to uphold in America.

03:17 Frank OK, Katie, Elizabeth, with that introduction to our three expats, let's take a break here. And when we come back, we'll get into our story. Welcome back. All right, guys, when we left, we had introduced three of our main characters, the expats, Dennis Barlow, a former screenwriter, and now what?

03:42 Katie A pet cemetery salesman.

03:44 Frank Right. That's right. And we also met Sir Francis Hinsley, a movie publicist, and then Sir Ambrose Abercrombie, Hollywood actor and keeper of the expat ethos. And Katie, because he lost his job, Dennis Barlow is now living at someone else's house.

03:58 Katie Yes, Francis Hinsley's house. He is a publicist at the same studio where Barlow worked.

04:03 Frank And Sir Ambrose has come to the house to complain about how these two men are now embarrassing the British community, the expats. He doesn't quite say it, but he knows Barlow is working at a pet cemetery.

04:14 Katie And we quickly get a description of Barlow at his job. Dennis gets a call from Miss Hinkle soliciting his services for her dead dog named Arthur. Dennis arrives at Miss Hinkle's place, negotiates the funeral arrangements, and stores Arthur's corpse back at Happier Hunting Grounds.

04:35 Frank But Elizabeth negotiates the funeral arrangements. That's a bit of an understatement, isn't it?

04:40 Elizabeth He sells her every service the cemetery offers. And Mrs. Hinkle is an easy customer. She's willing to buy whatever she can for her deceased dog. They even get a white dove liberated over the crematorium.

04:54 Frank That's right. Fancy casket, fancy burial, and fancy dove.

04:57 Elizabeth For every anniversary, they get a card of remembrance that says, your little Arthur is thinking of you in heaven today and wagging his tail.

05:06 Frank Quite a service. And while not all Dennis's jobs go this well, he's enjoying the work. It gives him time to work on his poetry.

05:14 Katie But his social reputation among the Brits was ruined.

05:17 Frank And things aren't going very well for Sir Francis Hinsley at the moment, are they?

05:21 Elizabeth First, the studio forces him to leave the premises and work from home. When his secretary stops showing up for work, Hensley confronts the studio brass.

05:30 Katie And he learns his contract has been terminated and that a younger publicist has replaced him.

05:36 Elizabeth And they didn't even bother to tell him.

05:38 Frank He walked into his office and found a new guy at the desk.

05:41 Elizabeth Who had gotten rid of all of his belongings.

05:44 Frank And not even put him in a box, just essentially threw him in the garbage. And guys, one page later, literally one page later in our book… We find out that Hinsley is dead.

05:55 Elizabeth He committed suicide.

05:56 Katie He was found by Barlow.

05:58 Frank How do we learn this?

06:00 Elizabeth Sir Ambrose is talking.

06:01 Katie Or gossiping.

06:02 Elizabeth Talking to the other Brits at the cricket club, he complains about Barlow and says he suggested Barlow go back to England.

06:10 Katie But… But then he tells everyone he asked Barlow to make all the arrangements for Hinsley's funeral, or at least the burial.

06:18 Frank And soon we are with Barlow as he visits Whispering Glades, the preeminent human cemetery in town.

06:24 Elizabeth And he meets a mortuary hostess.

06:26 Frank And this scene in a much larger way is reminiscent of how Dennis sold Mrs. Hinkle all the services for her dog.

06:32 Katie Right. Emphasis on much larger way. There are different rooms with different themes. There are different gardens or parks, as they call them, burial or cremation available.

06:44 Frank And we haven't even mentioned the chapels for various denominations or the caskets. It's all over the top. Yes.

06:51 Katie This is an example of Waugh's commentary on the cruel commercialism of the American funerary business. I think you call it.

06:59 Elizabeth It's decided that Hensley should be buried in their poet's corner, as at Westminster Abbey.

07:04 Katie And Barlow is concerned about the physical appearance of his friend. He says, I've seen him. He's terribly disfigured, you know. He wants to make sure that he looks presentable.

07:15 Elizabeth And the hostess assures him their cosmeticians can do amazing work.

07:19 Frank And Barlow finally picks the casket, the reception room with its theme and color, the burial grounds, and I think even the clothes. Only one thing is left now.

07:28 Elizabeth The deposit. $500.

07:31 Frank Well, $500. It is 1948.

07:33 Elizabeth That would have been about $6,000 nowadays.

07:37 Frank But with the arrangements for Sir Francis made, the selling continues.

07:41 Elizabeth The hostess tries to sell him a pre-death funeral burial plan.

07:45 Katie Barlow recognizes the script when one is read to him.

07:48 Elizabeth He's had similar scripts at the happier hunting grounds.

07:51 Frank Right, probably. And then he meets her, his Eve.

07:54 Katie The junior cosmetician, he is immediately intrigued. He finds her fascinating and becomes instantly infatuated with her.

08:03 Elizabeth In his mind, he calls her his redemption after a year of exile from his social circle.

08:08 Frank And as you said, she's the junior cosmetician. She takes care of the nails and the hair and the skin of the loved ones at the cemetery.

08:16 Elizabeth Yes, they make sure to call the deceased loved ones at this, at Whispering Glades.

08:22 Frank And she also takes personal data for the real hands of the operation.

08:26 Elizabeth Mr. Joy Boy, the chief mortician and cosmetician at Whispering Glades, and all of the young ladies who work there seem to greatly admire him, both his skill and his coolness.

08:38 Frank We continue to learn more about Sir Hinsley. We learn that he hanged himself with his suspenders and his face was hideously disfigured. Do we learn her name, by the way? I mean, does Barlow learn her name?

08:48 Katie She tells him to come back in two days and to ask for the cosmetician of the Orchid Room.

08:53 Frank Each room apparently has their own cosmeticians assigned to it. And in the meantime, Sir Ambrose is marshalling the forces of the British.

09:00 Elizabeth Sir Ambrose and the other prominent Englishmen composed the Order of the Service.

09:05 Frank Right. They're going to be in charge of how this funeral goes down, who gets to sit in front, who has to sit at the back, who gets to wear ribbons. I think he's even tried to invite the British ambassador to the United States.

09:17 Katie But that doesn't happen.

09:18 Frank And again, they've given Barlow tasks, even as they shun and disparage him.

09:22 Elizabeth One of the tasks is to write a poem for Sir Ambrose to recite before the burial.

09:28 Katie And he's to find something suitable in the works, the great English works, something suitable for Sir Ambrose to read.

09:36 Elizabeth And then there's the invitation list.

09:38 Frank Right. They can't decide whether they want to go small or do they want to really show the flag and have everybody come. But anyway, back to Whispering Glades, we have the scenes with Mr. Joy Boy and the young junior cosmetician.

09:50 Katie So we learn her name is Amy Thanatogonous. Amy, meaning loved one in French, and Thanatogonous, meaning born of death from Greek.

10:00 Frank Evelyn knows how to pick his names, doesn't he?

10:03 Elizabeth And she considers Mr. Joy Boy the perfection of high professional manners, a stylish and cultivated man.

10:10 Frank He's apparently highly acclaimed in the industry, and we soon learn a lot more about Miss Amy Thanatogonous.

10:16 Elizabeth Barlow meets her while working on his poem for the funeral on a romantic island, which is part of the cemetery in West Springglades. And she basically tells him her life story.

10:28 Katie She tells us about her childhood, her family, her college years, and then how she got into her occupation. She started as a hairdresser, and she had this one woman who came to her every week to set her hair. And then when this woman passed away, her family called Amy and said, no one knows how to do her hair like you did. Could you come and set her hair for her viewing?

10:52 Frank And that's how she gets hooked up with the mortuary.

10:54 Elizabeth Yeah. At first she says she liked the job just because she was doing hair for people that didn't talk. She eventually really started to love the job because she felt she was doing meaningful work and she was basically doing art and finding a way to bring people's loved ones back to a good appearance for their funeral, the way that they looked before they died.

11:22 Frank But Katie, the more we learn about her, the more we learn about her.

11:27 Katie It turns out she's a thoroughgoing product of Los Angeles. Empty-headed, yet yearns for higher things. Although she can't say what that really means to her. While she continues to express her admiration for Mr. Joy Boy, Dennis becomes enamored of her. And they date.

11:43 Frank And so six, eight weeks go on, and now torn between her affection for Dennis and for Mr. Joy Boy, she does what any woman of her age would do.

11:51 Elizabeth She reaches out to the local Deer Abbey, who is called Guru Brahman, and asks him what to do.

11:59 Frank And while waiting for a reply from the Guru,

12:02 Elizabeth Dennis continues wooing Amy by sending her plagiarized poetry from deceased English poets, the origins of which remain unbeknownst to her. And Amy is further bemused when Joy Boy informs her that she has been chosen to be groomed to be the first female embalmer at Whispering Glades.

12:23 Frank And in today's language, I guess grooming would be the right word.

12:28 Katie And Joy Boy quickly asks her to meet his mother for dinner.

12:31 Elizabeth But the same day that Amy meets Joy Boy's mother for dinner, she also attends a daytime date with Dennis in which she reveals that she has that she's going to get this promotion. And because of her potential raised earnings, Dennis proposes marriage. Once Amy realizes that this marriage proposal is only due to her new financial status, she becomes irate and storms out.

13:00 Frank Right. For Dennis, it's all about the money. Now he feels the two of them together will have enough money to get married. But to make matters worse for Amy, her previously held romantic feelings for Mr. Joy Boy also start to diminish when she meets his overbearing mother.

13:13 Katie Oh, yes. So Mrs. Joy Boy, when they enter the house, is in the living room listening to the radio and immediately shushes them. She has her parrot next to her. She has small angry eyes and frizzy hair, a shapeless body, and she is… Not very nice. Not very nice. Right.

13:36 Frank Elizabeth, she doesn't treat Amy very nicely, does she?

13:39 Elizabeth Oh, no, not at all welcoming. As soon as they walk in the door, the radio is blasting and she tells them to sit down quietly until the radio program is over.

13:50 Frank But Joy Boy explains to Amy, hey, you know, she's just treating you like one of us. She's not making any pretensions for a guest. This is how she treats all of us. This is how she treats everyone.

14:00 Katie Right. You should feel good about that.

14:04 Frank He really is kind of a mama's boy, isn't he?

14:07 Elizabeth Oh, yeah. Oh, for sure.

14:08 Frank And again, torn, Amy asks for more advice from Guru Brahman.

14:13 Elizabeth It turns out Guru Brahman was actually three separate people. A secretary, a columnist, and an alcoholic advice writer named Mr. Slump. After a little consideration, Mr. Slump tells Amy that she should absolutely choose Joy Boy over Dennis.

14:31 Frank All right, but before we find out who Amy actually does choose, let's take a break here. And when we come back, we'll finish our conversation about the novel, The Loved One. We'll be right back. Welcome back. Okay, Elizabeth, Katie, when we left Amy, she was deciding between Dennis Barlow and her mentor, Mr. Joy Boy, the choice of her dear Abby, the Guru Brahman. Katie, what does Amy decide?

15:03 Katie It seems as though she's decided on Barlow, partly because of the love poems that he filches from famous writers and leads her to believe that he wrote himself. Amy informs Guru Brahman and Joy Boy that she decided to marry Dennis after all.

15:19 Frank But Mr. Joy Boy has an ace up his sleeve.

15:22 Elizabeth He has read one of the poems that Barlow sent to Amy, which he claimed to be his own writing.

15:28 Frank And Amy wouldn't know it, but once Mr. Joy Boy reads it, he knows it's a fraud. He knows that Barlow didn't write this. And he exposes Dennis to Amy.

15:36 Katie And to complicate matters, Joy Boy also visits Happier Hunting Grounds to arrange the funeral for his mother's dead parrot.

15:44 Frank Oh no, his mommy's beloved dead parrot.

15:48 Katie And while he's there, Joy Boy discovers Dennis is the employee. Knowing that this information will devastate Amy, Joy Boy invites her to attend the funeral of the parrot.

15:59 Elizabeth The employees of Whispering Glades consider the Happier hunting ground to be a very degraded establishment. In fact, they make jokes about it all the time.

16:09 Frank And once she learns of Dennis's deceit, Amy ends their engagement and quickly becomes publicly engaged to Mr. Joy Boy.

16:16 Katie And Dennis tries to win Amy back, but to no avail. Then he reminds her that she made a promise to marry him, from which he refuses to release her.

16:25 Elizabeth Now, real quick, I was a little confused by this because nowadays anyone can just break off an engagement. Was it different back in the 40s?

16:34 Katie I mean, I think he just points out, you promised me. Okay.

16:37 Frank Well, she's young, she's naive, maybe a little immature. She might just think, well, I guess I did promise, and I guess I can't take it back. I see. I don't think he threatened to make it public or anything like that, because this is not a public engagement. It's not been in the papers, right? Right, and it hasn't been.

16:54 Katie Yeah, they say that it hasn't been announced yet.

16:56 Elizabeth Amy is distraught and conflicted. She calls Mr. Joyboy and begs him to come over to her apartment because she needs to talk things through, but he refuses, saying that he is too busy helping his mother with her new parrot.

17:10 Frank So then Amy seeks advice from Mr. Slump, who she learns has been fired. Still, he drunkenly berates Amy and actually suggests she jump out a window.

17:19 Elizabeth And at work the next day, she injects herself with embalming fluid and dies in Mr. Joyboy's room.

17:27 Frank Right. We learn about this death just as quickly as we learned about Sir Francis Hindley's death within one page of the previous scene.

17:35 Katie And Joy Boy finds Amy's corpse and, afraid that the scandal of his fiancé's suicide will ruin him professionally, he takes her to Happier Hunting Grounds for Dennis to help. And Dennis ensures Joy Boy that he will take care of it all. Dennis enlists Mr. Joy Boy to help him cart Amy's body to the Pet Cemetery for the secret cremation.

17:57 Frank Meanwhile, Dennis is approached by Sir Ambrose, who is so appalled that Dennis continues to work at the Pet Sematary that he pays him to go back to England rather than stay and besmirch the British community.

18:08 Elizabeth And so Barlow's plan is that everyone will think that Amy ran away with him and that they both moved back to England. Dennis extracts money from Mr. Joyboy for the financing of this plan, adding it to the payoff from Sir Ambrose.

18:24 Frank And our novel ends with everyone in town thinking Dennis and Amy ran off to England together. And perhaps the most devastating moments of the entire novel are these last few lines. We're told this about Dennis. He sits back with a book at the pet cemetery to await the finish of Amy's cremation. You guys want to react at all?

18:43 Elizabeth Katie, Katie facially reacted. I saw her face.

18:49 Frank Oof. All right, so now let's take a break and then head into our last segment where I'd like to ask the two of you to share a moment or a character or perhaps a quote that we haven't had a chance to get to. Right now, you're listening to Novel Conversations. I'm Frank Lovallo. We'll be right back. Welcome back. You're listening to Novel Conversations. I'm your host, Frank Lovallo, and today I'm having a conversation about the novel, The Loved One, by Evelyn Waugh. And I'm joined by our Novel Conversations readers, Elizabeth Flood and Katie Smith. All right, Elizabeth, Katie, before our break, we ended our conversation about The Loved One, and now I'd like to ask the two of you to perhaps share a moment or a character or even a quote that we haven't had a chance to get to. Elizabeth, do you have something?

19:40 Elizabeth So we're told that Mr. Joy Boy is in charge of the facial expressions of the corpses. And for Amy, he always makes a smile on the corpses' faces before he sends them over to her to do their hair and skin and nails. But as soon as he finds out that she's engaged to Dennis, he sends all the corpses over with frowns and sad faces and morose faces.

20:09 Frank I had forgotten about that moment. That's a great line. Thanks for reminding me of that one.

20:13 Katie Yeah. Katie, do you have something? One part that I appreciated a lot is when Dennis and Amy first begin to talk, Dennis is out sitting in the gardens of the cemetery and Amy comes to the same place. And that's how they start to talk. And Dennis quotes poetry just offhand. He says, half in love with easeful death. And Amy is so drawn to that. That's when she first starts to love him. She thought that was just such a beautiful line. Is that from a poem? And he plays it off, not saying he didn't write it, but not saying he did write it.

20:53 Frank He definitely wants her to have the impression that he wrote it.

20:55 Katie Right. And from then, that's when he realizes he can use poetry to woo her the rest of the way. Other people's poetry. Sly poet.

21:04 Elizabeth Yeah, he doesn't do a whole lot of his own poem writing, I noticed.

21:08 Frank Right. We do get some of his lines, but they, of course, they pale in comparison to the lines he's actually stealing from the real English poets. Yes. I'd like to talk about the scene where Dennis Barlow is talking to his boss at the Pet Sematary, Mr. Schultz. Dennis has been to the Whispering Glades funeral home and he's telling Mr. Schultz all about the fancy rooms and the caskets and the beautiful settings. And he suggests to Mr. Schultz that perhaps they amp up their game a little bit at the Pet Sematary. And of course, Mr. Schultz just disparages the human cemetery and says, oh, they all spend a lot of money for people that they never loved when they were alive. They just make a show of it once the person's dead. Here, we bury their pets, the pets that they've loved and that have loved them for years and years. And once the pet dies, all they care about is, ah, throw him in the garbage bag and let me spend, I don't wanna spend more than $10 on this process. These are the pets they really loved, and yet they're gonna spend money on people that they didn't love at all. And I just thought Mr. Schultz was a little bit jealous, I think, of Whispering Glades. But I think he's right. People sometimes will spend money for someone that they didn't quite care as much about as their little Yorkie. Elizabeth, do you have another moment or something you want to share?

22:26 Elizabeth I did want to point out how surprising it was to me that once Dennis learns of Amy's death, he doesn't seem upset at all. He is actually quite sarcastic about it and is very quick to come up with this scheme of how to get rid of her body. And really, it seems like he must have had a pretty shallow love for her if he's not in the slightest sad about her death.

22:59 Frank And that's why I found those last couple of lines so devastating and so hard. He sits back, reads a book while Amy's body is being consumed by the flames. No, I think you're absolutely right, Elizabeth. I don't think he cared for her at all. I think he saw her as a way back into polite society, if you will. This was gonna be his partner. Yeah, I think that's the whole point of the book, you know, is that death is taken too lightly and seen as- Death of humans is taken too lightly and perhaps death of pets too much- Taken too much, right.

23:32 Katie Is made of it. Well, both of those take me to the other thing I was going to say, which was about the pet burials in general, but particularly Mrs. Joyboy's parrots, because that's the occasion when Dennis gets to bring in everything he learned from Whispering Glades and then plant it into happier hunting grounds. And I think they see the casket for a parrot is too unsettling, so he tries to prop him up just like they prop up the loved ones at the Whispering Glades.

24:03 Frank Waugh was certainly able to paint a picture that compared and contrasted both funerals for pets and for humans. And I think it's with that note, ladies, that we'll end our conversation today about the novel The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh. I want to thank both of you for coming in and having this conversation with me today. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

24:23 Katie Always do. Thanks, Frank. Thanks so much.

24:25 Frank You're more than welcome. I'm Frank Lovallo, and you've been listening to Novel Conversations. Thanks for listening to Novel Conversations. If you're enjoying the show, please give us a five-star review wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find us on Instagram at Novel Conversations. Follow us to stay up to date on upcoming episodes and in anything else we've got in the works. I want to give special thanks to our readers today, Elizabeth Flood and Katie Portile. Our sound designer and producer is Noah Fouts, and Grace Sienna Longfellow is our audio engineer. Our executive producers are Bridget Coyne and Joan Andrews. I'm Frank Lovallo. Thank you for listening. I hope you soon find yourself in a novel conversation all your own.