Beware of Vulgarity

As a satirist, Evelyn Waugh's main goal is to point out people's false assumptions, pettiness, and misdeeds. Rather than addressing the question of how to repair whatever goes wrong between people, he skewers their pretentiousness and silliness. In this novel, much of the behavior he attacks is the result of vulgarity. The expatriate British and the American characters are equally guilty of being vulgar, which is to say they have abandoned or never did pursue the refinements of experience, in favor of common and tasteless preoccupations. Even Dennis Barlow, a poet whose first book was widely praised, writes ridiculous doggerel in the novel's only quotation from Barlow's work, part of a poem he writes upon the death of his friend, Sir Francis Hinsley. Aimée Thanatogenos aspires to finer considerations, but her American education was so vulgarized that she cannot even recognize some of the most...