One advantage to reading book reviews is that doing so, ninety percent of the time, obviates the need to read the book, even if the review is favorable (and I write as one who used to be a paid book reviewer). The New York Sun, however, has a review of a book for which I might even pay cash money and read, it being about two of my favorite authors, George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh: David Lebedoff, The Same Man: George Orwell & Evelyn Waugh in Love and War (Random House). The author's aim is to illustrate the similarities between the two, including their shared sour outlook on the modern age, their superb gifts for prose and the integrity they applied to their art.
Waugh and Orwell were not two peas in a pod, of course: if Orwell, famously atheistic, was (as he described it) from a "lower-upper middle class background," Waugh, a Catholic convert whose father was in trade (albeit publishing), was (as he did not describe it) from an "upper-lower middle class background." Waugh's aim was to rise higher in society and he did so brilliantly, becoming a darling of the upper classes, delighting them with his skewerings. Orwell, on the other hand, striving to become an man of the people, associated with the working class. He was not successful, however, lowering his station and as Eric Ormsby, the Sun's book reviewer amusingly recounts: "When [Orwell] consorted with hoboes, he was immediately recognized by his Eton accent and addressed as 'Sir,' much to his annoyance."
Don't you just hate it when that happens?
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