But despite the prophet's disapproval underlying the book, you can see why it would be sensationally and enduringly popular. It presents the same warning as a medieval ship of fools--"Repent Before It's Too Late!"--but with enticing, exquisitely kaleidoscopic, jazz-age dazzle. (Plus it has the good commercial sense not to get too specific about those unformulated questions.) What keeps the book spinning and refracting light is the way Waugh maintains a mature distance from the characters' gaddings-about while describing them in an up-to-the-minute idiom they themselves could appreciate. The book is giddy yet effortlessly accomplished, as if the author had performed an autopsy with a pearl-handled letter opener, without getting up from his chair or even putting down his cocktail. Waugh, who published the book when he was 26, comes across as the most enviably, fantastically deft young-old man, the ultramodern precocious fogey (infinitely better company than T.S. Eliot).

Vile Bodies is perhaps the least cumbersome, the most "deliciously" entertaining epic in literature. Its qualities are so unusual for epic that it applies some pressure to the definition of the genre. Epic is the romance of the group, and in its classic literary form, in Virgil's Aeneid, it serves as a glorification and justification of the group's destiny. Their destiny is ordained by the heavens and their military prowess in establishing a realm on earth reflects this higher sanction. Milton's Paradise Lost puts more emphasis on the spiritual than the earthly element but likewise has a martial vigor and grandiloquence.

The question, then, is whether Vile Bodies is too slight for epic. We expect a certain monumentalism of the genre, but epic has to mean something besides a production of sufficient scale (walled cities, sea-darkening fleets, massed armies, transport to heaven and hell, etc.). Isn't scope perhaps more important, that is, the ambition of the author to achieve an encompassing vision of the significance of the group's destiny? This factor gives Fiddler on the Roof (1971) more epic dimension than Lawrence of Arabia (1962), for all its chivalric sweep, and it's precisely what Waugh sneaks in on you while you're cackling over his clueless debauchees.

Another problem with epic is that in modern democratic countries artists tend not to be possessed of epic certainty. It turns out that such certainty, however, isn't essential. Instead, the artist's vision can be an expression of his doubt as to the group's destiny. Thus, Vile Bodies is an epic treatment of the English elite in which their presumption of eminence has a grandly hollow resonance.

Which is to say that Vile Bodies is an ironic epic--it pointedly places an epic structure on a foundation incapable of supporting it. The focal moment in this respect comes when Nina and Ginger, the rich husband she doesn't love, are flying to Monte Carlo for their honeymoon and Ginger asks if she knows a bit of poetry that he only half-remembers and misquotes and has no idea is John of Gaunt's tribute to England in Shakespeare's Richard II. (Ginger's version begins, "This scepter'd isle, this earth of majesty, this something or other Eden.") Ginger gestures toward the English epic ethos by following up with, "Well, I mean to say, don't you feel somehow, up in the air like this and looking down and seeing everything underneath. I mean, don't you have a sort of feeling rather like that, if you see what I mean?" Ginger, like Waugh, is looking down on the island but in his mouth the most movingly nationalistic verse in English letters becomes burlesque, exposing Ginger and his kind and sapping the sentiment as he gives halting voice it. To finish off any pretensions to national ascendancy Waugh ends his book by plunking down on that outsized battlefield a warrior-protagonist too emblematically depleted to accomplish anything on it.