SOURCE: "Reconsidering Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One," in Modern Age, Vol. 37, No. 2, Winter 1995, pp. 156-62.

Ross is an American educator, literary critic, and writer. In the following essay, Ross claims that The Loved One is Waugh's only truly satiric novel and notes that Waugh displays in it his deft understanding of the American character.

If we were to grade British authors of this century according to the degree of compassion manifest in their works, one novelist sure to flunk would be Evelyn Waugh. In recent years "compassion" has become a buzz word and it is precisely the overtones carried in its buzz that may account in part for Waugh's unsteady place on the literary stockmarket on this side of the Atlantic. Not only, as a writer, does Waugh lose points for his low compassion-count but also, as a person, he comes across as hardly tolerable: the image of...