Waugh was a master at mixing humor and pathos, as evidenced by his two most ambitious novels: A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited.

Fictional, yes, but to a journalist like myself, most everything about the novel is too real. Of course, this fictional parent could give his/her fictional child Evelyn Waugh's Scoop - a fictional 1938 tale of British foreign correspondents reporting on a civil war in the fictional East African country of Ishmaelia. On days when there was little so-called news to report, the newspapers filled their pages with stories about, say, puppies who could recite Macbeth or people who wore jeggings to work. The newspapers competed with each other by sending actual people out into the actual world to report what had taken place, was going to take place - or, even, was alleged to have taken place but didn't. There were many such newspapers, to be read in the morning, over breakfast, and in the evening, over scotch. In only a few years, a child will ask a parent about newspapers: What was their purpose? What did people do with them, and why? The parent, a little flummoxed, will explain that, long before biosensitive data aggregators simply uploaded information into the neurons of our frontal cortexes, people actually read the news by holding a piece of paper in front of their noses and scanning columns of text with their eyes.

How?Īlexander Nazaryan is a writer living in Brooklyn. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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