She quickly becomes a pretext for a number of sublunary jibes at American women. For instance, we read of Aimée embalming herself for a date: "With a steady hand [she] fulfilled the prescribed rites of an American girl preparing to meet her lover - dabbed herself under the arms with a preparation designed to seal the sweatglands, gargled another to sweeten the breath, and brushed into her hair some odorous drops from a bottle labeled: 'Jungle Venom' - 'From the depth of the fever-ridden swamp,' the advertisement had stated" (111). Later Waugh goes on, repeating himself in part: "Aimée Thanatogenos spoke the tongue of Los Angeles; the sparse furniture of her mind… had been acquired at the local High School and University; she presented herself to the world dressed and scented in obedience to the advertisements; brain and body were scarcely distinguishable from the standard product… " (134).

After Aimée loses confidence in both Mr. Joyboy and Dennis, we read, "Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture" (135). Despite her name and her faith in the Dreamer, Aimée is not an allegorical figure having to do with spirituality but Waugh's proof that if you've seen one mass-produced American girl, you've seen them all, and he seems to mean it literally. He's so insistent about it that he forgets what he wrote when Dennis first sees her - "the girl who now entered was unique" (54; emphasis added).

Waugh constructs the composite Aimée out of crap-sociological "observations" - is any of this material on topic, assuming we can discern one? Waugh wrote of the ideas he had in mind in writing The Loved One, working up from the specific to the general: "1st … and quite predominantly overexcitement with the scene of Forest Lawn," "3rd there is no such thing as an American. They are all exiles uprooted, transplanted & doomed to sterility," and "5th Memento mori, old style, not specifically Californian" (Letters 265-6). Waugh tries to bring it all together by writing as Aimée kills herself, "[S]he had communed perhaps with the spirits of her ancestors, the impious and haunted race who had deserted the altars of the old Gods, had taken ship and wandered, driven by what pursuing furies through what mean streets and among what barbarous tongues!" (149).

This only leads to a further objection: it's one thing to suggest that Anglicans have put themselves out of the way of salvation, as Waugh does in A Handful of Dust, a jeremiadic claim with a basis in the rejection of the true church, in Waugh's view, by the Church of England. By contrast, saying that Americans are damned makes no sense because "American," as depicted here in Los Angeles circa 1947, doesn't represent a spiritual tradition. And if you specify American low-church Protestants like Aimée, as this last passage about her suggests, you're not describing The Loved One as Waugh wrote it, what with all the nonsense about deodorants and mouthwash and public schools, etc.