![]() But at his best, Waugh is a blazing practitioner of the short story, for it proves an ideal framework for a style that eschews the psychoanalytical investigations of modernist writers like Joyce or Woolf for taut social commentary, stylized characters and hilarious, dramatic conceits. ![]() ![]() Among them are two intriguing chapters of Work Suspended, a novel that Waugh abandoned in the mid-1940s, and his Oxford writings and juvenilia. ![]() "It seems to me that Nature, like a lazy author, will round off abruptly into a short story what she obviously intended to be the opening of a novel," observes the Oxford-dropout narrator of "A House of Gentlefolk," and the same might be said of a handful of the 40-odd short pieces in this lavishly entertaining collection that resemble sketches and false starts toward longer works. ![]()
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