[In the following review of Charles Ryder's Schooldays and Other Stories, Broyard finds the work completely without merit.]

With the exception of Put Out More Flags, I think I've liked all of Evelyn Waugh's fiction, and so it saddens me to report that Charles Ryder's School Days and Other Stories, most of which were published in a limited edition in 1936, is not very good.

Perhaps the most conspicuous example of the difference between Waugh at his best and worst is the piece called “By Special Request,” which is an alternative ending to A Handful of Dust. At the end of that novel, Tony Last was disillusioned by the affair of his wife, Brenda, with a man named Beaver, and he went off on a trip to South America, where he was held prisoner in the jungle by an illiterate old man who forced him to read Dickens aloud, over and over again, presumably to the end of his life.

For reasons he doesn't give, Mr. Waugh chose to tamper with that unimprovable ending. In “By Special Request,” Tony merely goes on an idle cruise to places like Haiti and returns home to find that Brenda has been abandoned by Beaver and wishes to give up her flat in London and to live again with Tony in the country. She insists on his canceling the lease on the flat, but unknown to her, Tony decides to keep it. The implicit assumption is that the once-serious and austere Tony is planning to have affairs there himself—unless he means to throw Brenda out or to keep it for her next affair.

The tone of “By Special Request” reminds me of Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays. Tony and Brenda are confined to half-thoughts expressed in self-consciously flat, simple declarative sentences. If the ending is pregnant, it's not a very promising pregnancy, for in each of the possible uses of the flat, both Tony and Brenda lose interest as characters. The available ironies are not significant enough to animate the flatness of the passages between Tony and Brenda.

“Charles Ryder's School Days” is, according to the book jacket, “a recently discovered sketch about the early life and family background of Charles Ryder, the nostalgic hero of Brideshead Revisited.” What this piece comes down to, though, is an incomprehensible fuss about who is elected to the Settle, some sort of honorific club in the university; who is head of the dormitory; who is keen on whom, and why a character named Apthorpe is moved from the lower anteroom to the upper anteroom.

The first story in the book, which gave the earlier edition its title, Mr. Loveday's Little Outing and Other Sad Stories, is an absolutely predictable piece about a mild-mannered man, who, after having strangled a young woman in his youth, has passed 35 years in a mental hospital, where he has become so sane, useful and well loved that he is generally taken for an exceptional guard rather than a patient. When someone secures his release, it takes no great effort to imagine the first thing he does.

“Cruise” is a series of semiliterate letters written by a debutante traveling with her parents. It must have been a very dark day in Evelyn Waugh's life when he wrote it. “Period Piece,” an elderly woman's account of an ancient and humorless quarrel between two now-dead men seems gratuitous at best. “On Guard” is an excruciatingly cute story about a dog and a young woman. […]

“Winner Takes All” is one of those infernal older-brother versus-younger-brother stories peculiar to the English. In this one, a scheming mother steals all the younger brother's accomplishments for the older one. Waugh's irony here seems to be suffering from something like mental fatigue. Believe it or not, there's also a story about a mad and reclusive old woman who spends her last penny on a magnificent ball and forgets to mail the invitations.

So we have the melancholy spectacle of one of the century's best authors writing badly. Reading Charles Ryder's School Days is like visiting an old friend who's out of sorts. In Evelyn Waugh's work, such occasions are very rare.