The following podcast contains explicit language.

I'm Megan O'Rourke, Slate's Culture Critic, and welcome to our audio book club.

Today we're discussing Evelyn Waugh's Bride's Head Revisited, which has just been made into a major motion picture.

Joining me today are Katie Royfe, a Slate contributor and NYU professor, and Troy Patterson, Slate's

television critic. Thanks for coming in.

Morning.

So Brideshead Revisited, a book that is somewhat anomalous, we might say, in Yvlin Wah's career, or perhaps not, a book that sharply divided critics at the time it was published and until now, I think, and a book that I had never read before, although I've read a lot of other Yvlin Watt books. So I just wanted to start there with, what are your overall opinions of the book?

And how do you see, I know, Troy, that you've read a lot of Yvlin Wah.

How do you see this book fitting into the context of his career?

On that score, I am with Martin Amos, who calls it sort of a problem comedy, likening it to Mansfield Park.

I'm quoting Amos now, worrying inordinate, self-conscious,

a book that steps out of genre and never really looks at home with its putative author.

I love Waugh.

I think will we agree that he's the greatest comic novelist of the 20th century?

I love him for his comedy, for the keenness of his ear and dialogue. No one's ever

written sort of dialogue like this, I think, that evokes characters, pins them down, jokes

are so deeply embedded to spring back. Characterization in Waugh frequently is strictly a matter of dialogue and I appreciate that and so

I know him as the cruel vicious cold beautiful marvelous comic novelist of scoop of vile bodies

of a handful of dust brides had revisited some call his most loved book,

perhaps also his most hated, and certainly his most sentimental. It is this odd child.

Definitely an odd child. I mean, I, like Troy, I know the law of scoop vile bodies and a handful of

dust best. And in fact, I read

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