That Is All

In his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (the 1891 edition), Oscar Wilde wrote:

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

I would call Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One (1948) very well written --

The complete stillness was more startling than any violent action. The body looked altogether smaller than life-size now that it was, as it were, stripped of the thick pelt of mobility and intelligence. And the face which inclined its blind eyes towards him -- the face was entirely horrible; as ageless as a tortoise and as inhuman; a painted and smirking obscene travesty by comparison with which the devil-mask Dennis had found in the noose was a festive adornment, a thing an uncle might don at a Christmas party.

-- Well written, but almost sociopathically cruel. This cruelty has been yoked with humour so closely that every laugh (and the book incites constant laughter) makes me feel as if I were an accomplice to some crime against an innocent fictional character: Aimée Thanatogenos, whose only failing is that she is American and therefore much less bright than the British expatriate poet who lies to her, and then drives her to misery.

With Wilde's comment in mind, I feel that Waugh's book is more than justified by its prose, and since my teenage years, I have thought of it as one of the funniest books I know:

When as a newcomer to the Megalopolitan Studios he first toured the lots, it had strained his imagination to realize that those solid-seeming streets and squares of every period and climate were in fact plaster façades whose backs revealed the structure of bill-boardings. Here the illusion was quite otherwise. Only with an effort could Dennis believe that the building before him was three-dimensional and permanent; but here, as everywhere in Whispering Glades, failing credulity was fortified by the painted word.

This perfect replica of an old English Manor, a notice said, like all the buildings of Whispering Glades, is constructed throughout of Grade A steel and concrete with foundations extending into solid rock. It is certified proof against fire, earthquake and Their name liveth for evermore who record it in Whispering Glades.

At the blank patch a signwriter was even then at work and Dennis, pausing to study it, discerned the ghost of the words "high explosive" freshly obliterated and the outlines of "nuclear fission" about to be filled in as substitute.

I still find a laugh on every page, but I now have greater admiration and respect for Ronald Firbank's The Flower Beneath The Foot, which is not only more funny, but which has the courage to recognize, in its haunting final words, the pain of despair.