The Loved One

The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy is a satirical novella by the English writer Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1948 following a visit he made to Hollywood and to the Forest Lawn Memorial Park cemetery that inspired its setting. It follows Dennis Barlow, a young English poet working at a Hollywood animal-pet mortuary called the Happier Hunting Ground after failing as a screenwriter, who becomes involved with Aimee Thanatogenos, a cosmetician at the vast, opulently sentimental human cemetery Whispering Glades, modeled closely on Forest Lawn, where the dead are euphemistically called the Loved Ones and prepared for burial amid a landscape of imitation European monuments and quasi-religious kitsch. Dennis begins a rivalry for Aimee's affections with Mr. Joyboy, Whispering Glades' star embalmer, and the novella's plot turns on Aimee's eventual suicide after she learns of Dennis's own occupation and of Joyboy's compromising secret, leaving Dennis to cremate her body himself at his pet mortuary's ovens before returning, unrepentant, to England. Waugh's mercilessly satirical portrait of the American funeral industry's commercialized denial of death, and of a Hollywood culture he saw as fundamentally philistine, made the novella a controversial success on its publication, and its title and setting have remained a byword for the euphemistic packaging of death in American commercial culture.