Devoted to his wife, Brenda, his son, John Andrew, and to Hetton, his very ugly neo-Gothic homestead, Tony Last will lose all three. As his name is always announcing, Last lives at the end of a dying age, the brittle, exhausted 1930s, when England, at least Waugh’s England, is a place where Brenda can throw herself at the feet of a childish lover and where Last can discard his life on an absurd caprice. Waugh’s own marriage was disintegrating when he wrote this, and his unhappiness led him into wider realms of feeling — pathos, rage — than any you find in his earlier triumphs of nasty wit, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies. Sound dreary? Not even slightly. If this is Waugh at his bleakest it’s also Waugh at his deepest, most poisonously funny.
All-TIME 100 Novels
Critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo pick the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923—the beginning of TIME.
A Handful of Dust
Full List
Making the List
A - B
- The Adventures of Augie March
- All the King’s Men
- American Pastoral
- An American Tragedy
- Animal Farm
- Appointment in Samarra
- Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
- The Assistant
- At Swim-Two-Birds
- Atonement
- Beloved
- The Berlin Stories
- The Big Sleep
- The Blind Assassin
- Blood Meridian
- Brideshead Revisited
- The Bridge of San Luis Rey
C - D
F - G
H - I
L - N
O - R
S - T
U - W
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