A Warning and Chapter One Summary

The Loved One, by Evelyn Waugh, is a satire of bad taste in post-war America that takes place principally in two Los Angeles funeral homes. One of these facilities is for humans and the other is for pets. A young Englishman who had worked as a screenwriter takes a job at the funeral home for and eventually develops a crush on a young woman who works on human corpses as a cosmetician at the other funeral home. The title page provides the subtitle, "An Anglo-American Tragedy." A paragraph that appears before Chapter One, titled, "A Warning," describes the story as fiction and "a little nightmare." The author warns that readers who are easily upset should return the book to wherever they got it. Chapter One begins with a description of the ocean, foothills, and palm...