Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh is an epic satire of English high society after the Great War written with the brittle wit, insinuating intimacy, and skittering attention span of a gossip column. The protagonist Adam Fenwick-Symes, a posh but broke young writer, does, in fact, end up penning a tell-all newspaper column after his unpublished manuscript is confiscated at customs on his return from the continent and burned. (The officer also takes his copy of Purgatorio, which "doesn't look right." It isn't: based on what follows, Inferno would have been more appropriate.) Typically of both himself and all the people in his set, what Adam feels is more on the order of inconvenience than outrage.

For one thing, he's already spent the advance from his publisher. Having no money or income further means he can't afford to marry his girl Nina. The fate of their engagement goes up and down with Adam's financial prospects, and in the world Waugh depicts there's no other basis for marriage, certainly nothing like common morality or religious adherence. Which turns out to have its convenient side, after all: Adam and Nina don't let the inadvisability of their marrying each other keep them from sleeping together, even after she's married to someone else. (Nina brings Adam home for Christmas and presents him as her husband to her addled father, and to the servants who know better.) Nobody in the vast array of characters Adam and Nina come across socially and professionally would do any different. Adultery is common morality to them.

Vile Bodies imagines no alternative in the present for its amoral creatures (who live down to such names as Miles Malpractice, Father Rothschild S.J., and the Duchess of Stayle) and only a worse future, when they'll lack the will to get serious about the (unspecified) international conflict they'll be engaged in. (We last see Adam, having lost his platoon on "the biggest battlefield in the history of the world," a scene of "unrelieved desolation," still playing footsie with Nina by mail and trying to get his money from a drunken major who earlier placed a bet on a winning horse for him.)

When Adam first visits Nina's father (to hit him up for £1,000 so they can marry), he asks the taxi driver to take him to Doubting, the father's house. The taxi driver refers to it as Doubting Hall, which he pronounces Doubting 'All, the pun at the center of the book's vortex. From Waugh's point of view, "doubting all" is the characters' universal problem. (Vile Bodies came out in 1930, the year Waugh converted to Catholicism.) The glittering world of the book is a world without answers in which it's considered vulgarly "impudent" even to formulate the questions.