Word: waugh
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...plague spreads; old scoffers answer their phones, hear the message, but shut it out when they can, determined to caper out their danse macabre till they drop. At their best, which of course is their worst, they behave like characters somehow kept alive after the last page of a Waugh novel and unearthed 40 years later...
...rhymes with highball) belongs to that growing family of ex-colonial heroes who have their feet firmly planted in the muck of local tradition and their heads lifted to the sweet smell of Western excess. But where such literary antecedents as E.M. Forster's Dr. Aziz and Evelyn Waugh's Emperor Seth burned with a hard heathen shame, Ganesh shoulders the white-collar burden with the happy ease of a born...
...steer the characters in The Watsons in "original" directions, for fear they will grow too like the characters in other Austen novels-until honest imitation melts into irresistible parody. It all goes to show the difficulties confronting an author who has been raised in the world of Thurber, Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett and must yet deal deadpan with ploys (such as swoons and blushes) of which he has had no experience...
...paying its last respects to a man it genuinely liked-he had died in Spain on the set of his latest movie, Solomon and Sheba-Hollywood somehow had to turn the occasion into a supercolossal production. It brought to grisly life the mordant funeral fantasies of Evelyn Waugh or Nathanael West...
Author Southern's California of wide-screen girls, cultists, simpletons and satyrs has been seen before in Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One and in the misanthropic novels of Nathanael West. Southern hits more gently than Waugh or West, and is not so accomplished a writer. Though he is strikingly inventive in short scenes, he seems unable to plot beyond a dozen pages. Like the old two-reelers, Flash and Filigree lacks weight and discipline, but it also has an unfailing sense of the ridiculous, heightened by deadpan delivery...