Adam Fenwyck-Symes has a depressing existence as far as fictional characters go. He is the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh’s second novel, Vile Bodies, and his character confirms the fact that Evelyn Waugh was a sadist when it came to his own literary creations. Symes is a modern young man—one of T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Men—a typical example of his own Lost Generation (as Hemmingway would call it). The setting of Vile Bodies is inter-war Britain, with its dichotomized society of old-line Victorians shell-shocked by the Great War and up-and-coming ne’er-do-wells, interested only in the latest gossip, fashion, and anything unserious. Compared to the other characters who populate the novel, Adam Fenwyck-Symes is at least an occasionally sympathetic figure. His story is introduced as he has the misfortune to run afoul of an old-fashioned customs official while returning home from overseas.

One by one he took the books out and piled them on the county. A copy of Dante’s Purgatorio excited his especial disgust.

“French, eh?” he said. “I guessed as much, and pretty dirty, too, I shouldn’t wonder. Now just you wait while I look up these here books” –how he said it!—“in my list. Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can’t stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside. That’s what he said the other day in Parliament. I says ‘Hear, hear….’

Symes’ copy of Dante is confiscated by the zealous official, along with Symes’ own memoirs which he was planning to publish in order to prove to Nina that he was ready to marry her. This confrontation with an older Victorian generation is only the first of many in Vile Bodies. Another memorable episode is Adam’s visit with Nina’s father, a retired and senile British colonel who is too cheap to pay for a bus or cab fare, but endlessly excited about the prospect of funding a new religious film about the life of John Wesley. Adam petitions the old man for financial aid, but discovers too late that the check the old man gives him is signed “Charlie Chaplin.” Tellingly, the Colonel’s home is named “Doubting Hall,” which Adam’s cabbie mispronounces as “Doubting ‘All.” It’s more than hinted that both the old and the young generation in Vile Bodies suffer from a great, all-encompassing meaningless. There is nothing sacred, nothing stable any longer. The war was proved meaningless; virtue is meaningless, certainly; marriage is meaningless—and most frustratingly, pleasure is meaningless. After Nina and Adam spend the night together, Nina comments, “I never hated anything so much in my life... still as long as you enjoyed it that's something.” Nothing brings fullness or resolution—even sex fails to bring intimacy or fulfillment. It is societal impotency on a number of levels.

From the opening episodes in Vile Bodies, it’s easy to assume that the target of the novelist’s satire is the older generation of Victorians—with their comically stodgy notions about money and fashion, literature and movies (not to mention their pride and xenophobia). They are certainly comedic figures throughout the novel—they are even antagonists quite often of Adam and his fiancée. Yet as Symes and his friends get into comedic tangles and scrapes, the reader is left with the nagging idea that there’s something wrong with the younger crowd, too—for all their charm, wit, and vivacity.

Adam’s friends are all over-the-top. Agatha Runcible, a Paris Hilton figure with infinitely more verbal flair, commands the attention of all the London gossip rags. Her greatest moment comes after she sponsors a drunken party with some rather naïve young girls, wakes the next morning to an extremely awkward breakfast with their parents, then walks out the door to discover she had been partying and dining at Number 10 Downing Street, the residence of the prime minister (whose tenure doesn’t last long after the newspapers spread the word of what happened under his very nose). Among other misadventures, the voice of the narrator remains passive and unamused as the “bright young things” flit about between various excesses and comedic immoralities.. The younger generation knows how to laugh at itself, if nothing else. But gradually, the narrator does seem to develop an acid tone as he relates the endless frivolity of Symes and his friends. The narrative voice notes how they pass their time with

Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West 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, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity…. Those vile bodies….

In the end, the bright young things reach the end of their own “fatal hunger for permanence,” as a Jesuit character phrases it. Agatha Runcible dies among her own hallucinations, turning to Symes: “How people are disappearing, Adam.” Another of Adam’s friends is exiled to France on account of homosexuality. Others fall prey to malicious gossip, backbiting, and fashion faux-pas. In the end, everything comes crashing down as an apocalyptic war consumes Europe.