'Bright Young People' by D.J. Taylor

The Lost Generation

of London's Jazz Age

D.J. Taylor

Farrar, Straus & Giroux:

364 pp., $27

"Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St. John's Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths," wrote Evelyn Waugh in "Vile Bodies," published in 1930. "Dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris -- all the succession and repetition of massed humanity. . . . Those vile bodies."

Still in his mid-20s, Waugh finished this novel, his second, while an ill-fated marriage, his first, to Evelyn Gardner (known as "She-Evelyn") was falling apart. "She-Evelyn," who had been engaged some 15 times before she finally settled on Waugh, had run off with a man from the BBC. This last aspect of the matter was, for Waugh, an insult that only added to the injury and public humiliation; his wife was making a cuckold of him with a man who spoke on the radio.

Waugh responded with a hilarious yet increasingly despairing satire of the wild goings-on and giddy gaddings-about of the set to which he, his wife and her lover belonged -- a group known to eager London gossip columnists as the "Bright Young People" or "Bright Young Things."

D.J. Taylor, an English novelist and the author of an excellent biography of George Orwell, takes this social grouping as the subject for his new book, "Bright Young People," assembling the history and the particular social atmosphere behind the creation of Waugh's anarchic fictive cosmos. The action plays out in the reckless years following one world war and preceding the economic cataclysm that would lead to another. The soundtrack here is the bongo beat of the Jazz Age, the settings switch between the streets and clubs of London and houses of ancient stone in the English countryside; the atmosphere is of doom and glamour.

And there are plenty of names: "Babe" Plunket Greene, Eddie Gathorne-Hardy, Bryan Guinness, the Honorable Hamish St. Clair Erskine and others who will chime a Monty Python-ish tone to some American ears, while remaining familiar to readers of British Vogue.