Heavily influenced by the cinema and by the disjointed style of T. S. Eliot, Vile Bodies is Waugh's most ostentatiously "modern" novel.[4] Fragments of dialogue and rapid scene changes are held together by the dry, almost perversely unflappable narrator.[5] Waugh said it was the first novel in which much of the dialogue takes place on the telephone. The book shifts in tone from light-hearted romp to bleak desolation (Waugh himself later attributed it to the breakdown of his first marriage halfway through the book's composition).[6] Some have defended the novel's downbeat ending as a poetically just reversal of the conventions of comic romance.[7][8]
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