Books: Wrong Boot

SCOOP—Evelyn Waugh—Little, Brown ($2.50).

Evelyn Waugh (pronounced Waw) is the Erskine Caldwell of the British upper classes. The feeble-minded baronets that he pictured in Vile Bodies and Decline and Fall peer out upon the great world in contented incomprehension. Although they are not as hungry as Caldwell's Tobacco Roaders, they have the same weary way of repeating themselves, the same facility in wrecking automobiles, the same batlike blinking bewilderment, when some thing new appears. When Decline and Fall, published in 1929, won extraordinary acclaim for its 25-year-old author, critics said that Waugh...