Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust
Waugh, Evelyn. A Handful of Dust. Boston: Little, Brown, 1977 (1934).
The ending of this book creeped me out more than anything I've read lately, and I'm still puzzling about how it happened. A lot of it comes from a disorienting change of genre; the first two thirds of the book are recognizable as consummate, deliciously cold Flaubertian satire (half of it is Waugh's way of tracking the minute fluctuations of vanity), and the form isn't disrupted even by the major tragedy at the book's midpoint. It's afterward that things turn Gothic and exotic, adding continual degrees of weirdness; first you ask about the author - Is he doing this on purpose? He does know what he's doing, right? - and then you forget the author and simply watch the protagonist's fate close around him, a fate that would be a sour joke if it weren't so terrible, and thinking only Can't he get out? There must be a way out, if I were him I would have found a way out -
So the whole last third of the book comes out gratuitous and inexplicable as measured by the modernist formal standards evoked in its title and epigraph (I will show you fear in a...). But it kept me up that night.
The ending of this book creeped me out more than anything I've read lately, and I'm still puzzling about how it happened. A lot of it comes from a disorienting change of genre; the first two thirds of the book are recognizable as consummate, deliciously cold Flaubertian satire (half of it is Waugh's way of tracking the minute fluctuations of vanity), and the form isn't disrupted even by the major tragedy at the book's midpoint. It's afterward that things turn Gothic and exotic, adding continual degrees of weirdness; first you ask about the author - Is he doing this on purpose? He does know what he's doing, right? - and then you forget the author and simply watch the protagonist's fate close around him, a fate that would be a sour joke if it weren't so terrible, and thinking only Can't he get out? There must be a way out, if I were him I would have found a way out -
So the whole last third of the book comes out gratuitous and inexplicable as measured by the modernist formal standards evoked in its title and epigraph (I will show you fear in a...). But it kept me up that night.
