The books that ate the rich better than The White Lotus

The third series of The White Lotus wraps up soon, amid general agreement that it’s been slightly less inspired than seasons one and two. As with those earlier outings, season three has followed the exploits of a group of moneyed and obnoxious American tourists spending a week at a luxury resort.

Over three seasons – set in Hawaii, Sicily and, now, Thailand – the show’s creator, Mike White, has used longform TV the way earlier satirists used the novel. He’s used characters from all points on the social spectrum to reflect light, from multiple angles, on a central theme.

Leslie Bibb, Michelle Monaghan and Carrie Coon as three friends in season three of The White Lotus.

The unifying theme of The White Lotus is class. Some of the show’s characters have it and some don’t. Generally speaking, the tourists in the show are hopeless vulgarians, drowning in wealth but devoid of class. The humble staff of the White Lotus resorts – the dignified locals who smilingly absorb the arrogance of their rich American guests – are the classy ones.

With Donald Trump in the White House, class is a timely theme. Trump and his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk seem determined to ram home, in the political arena, a point that Mike White has more subtly made in The White Lotus. In America, money can buy you everything except class.

Mind you, class is a tricky thing to define. The word’s meaning shifts according to where you are, and when. Certainly “class” doesn’t mean the same thing now that it meant a century ago, especially in Britain.

For British novelists in the 20th century, class was an unavoidable theme. Battered by two world wars, Britain’s arcane, rigidly hierarchical class system was crumbling. Some novelists lamented the decline of the old order. Others were delighted to see the back of it.

Evelyn Waugh, the greatest English satirist of that century, was obsessed with class. In The White Lotus, the rich characters are “entitled” only in the metaphorical sense. Waugh’s novels were full of people who were quite literally entitled: Lords and Ladies, Baronets and Earls.

In his early comic novels – especially in Vile Bodies (1930) and A Handful of Dust (1934) – Waugh brilliantly satirised the antics of English high society’s Bright Young Things. But the fun he poked at the posh was more affectionate than savage. Born into the middle class, Waugh was an insecure and deeply snobbish man, who yearned for admission to the upper orders.

Evelyn Waugh’s high society satires: Vile Bodies (1930) and A Handful of Dust (1934).

One way he pursued that doomed ambition was by wooing and marrying higher-born women than himself. His first marriage, to the flighty young aristocrat Evelyn Gardner, was a disaster that lasted less than a year.

Gardner’s mother, the formidable Lady Burghclere, had opposed the marriage from the start, finding Waugh irredeemably bourgeois. “It never occurred to me to think I wasn’t a gentleman until Lady Burghclere pointed it out,” Waugh wrote later.

When his mother-in-law told Waugh he wasn’t a gentleman, she didn’t mean he was ill-mannered. As it happened he was, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that he was ill-bred. He hadn’t been born into the gentry. Ergo, he wasn’t a gentleman, and nothing he did could ever turn him into one.

In Waugh’s day, class wasn’t something you could acquire by behaving in a classy way. It was something you were born with or not. And Waugh had chosen his parents unwisely. His father was a mere publisher. To our ears that sounds like a respectable enough profession. But to people like Lady Burghclere, “professional” was in itself a dirty word. It meant – horror of horrors – that you had to work for your money instead of being born with it.

During World War II, Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited, an elegy for the vanished aristocratic world of the 1920s. Brideshead lacked the satirical edge of Waugh’s early work, and many of his upper-class friends found it embarrassingly sentimental. Ironically, one reason they found Waugh vulgar was that he revered their world too much.

One of Waugh’s upper-class friends was the novelist Nancy Mitford. As the senior writer, Waugh mentored Nancy’s early fictional efforts, providing brutal advice on style and structure. “The punctuation is pitiable,” he told her, after reading the manuscript of Love in a Cold Climate.

Mitford’s girls: Lily James (as Linda Radlett) and Emily Beecham (as Fanny Logan) in the BBC’s 2021 adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love.

It was Waugh who suggested the title for Nancy’s first hit novel, The Pursuit of Love. Mitford might have been Waugh’s inferior in the field of prose, but she had social advantages he would have killed for. Born into the aristocracy, she had the luxury of being able to chronicle upper-class life from the inside.

In The Pursuit of Love, the most memorable image of upper-class weirdness is the scene in which Uncle Matthew – modelled on Mitford’s father, Baron Redesdale – stages a “child hunt”, where his children play the part traditionally assigned to the fox. The kids run off into the countryside, getting a good head start. Then the hounds set off in hot pursuit, followed by assorted toffs on horseback.

Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love (1945) and Love in a Cold Climate (1949).

Under the frothy surface of Mitford’s novels, there were chilling signs of how dysfunctional aristocratic families could be. When Polly, the central character of Love in a Cold Climate, loses a baby in childbirth, her mother offers some famously callous words of consolation. “So the poor little baby died,” she says. “I expect it was just as well, children are such an awful expense nowadays.”

That shocking sentence crystallised an unpleasant truth about upper-class life. It wasn’t always a picnic for children – especially female children, who stood no chance of inheriting the family estate. In real life, Nancy Mitford and her talented sisters were given short shrift by their parents. Their brother Tom, the heir, was sent to Eton and Oxford. The girls were homeschooled by a governess.

“I never loved her,” Nancy said of her mother, “for the evident reason that she never loved me… I don’t reproach her for it, people have a perfect right to dislike their children.”

Half a century after Mitford’s heyday, another high-born English novelist seemed to administer the last rites to the class system. Edward St Aubyn, in his heavily autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels, eviscerated the supposedly glamorous aristocratic world he’d been born into.

Edward St Aubyn, author of the autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels.Credit: Timothy Allen

St Aubyn’s fictional alter ego, Patrick Melrose, comes from “a family which, although it had done nothing since, had seen the Norman invasion from the winning side.” As a young boy, Patrick is repeatedly raped by his tyrannical father, as St Aubyn himself was in real life. In common with his creator, Patrick becomes a heroin addict, an alcoholic, and a bitter critic of upper-class values.

“As to the naive faith that rich people are more interesting than poor ones, or titled people more interesting than untitled ones,” he says at one point, “I can feel the death throes of that particular delusion.”

Evelyn Waugh himself, after WWII, increasingly lost interest in satirising the English class system. In his first post-war novel, The Loved One, Waugh turned his sights on a promising new target for satire: America.

Dennis Barlow, the novel’s hero, is a middle-class Englishman. But by transplanting himself to California, Barlow finds that he’s moved up in the world. He represents “an earlier civilisation”. He can quote poetry. Compared with the locals, he’s a virtual aristocrat.

Martin Amis explored similar territory in his comic masterpiece, Money (1984). Amis got inspiration for the novel while serving as a script doctor on the Hollywood turkey Saturn 3 (1980). Working in close quarters with the movie’s egomaniacal stars, Kirk Douglas and Harvey Keitel, Amis felt his satirical urges stirring.

Martin Amis at home in London in 1995.Credit: Getty

In Money, Douglas was reborn as the hilariously grandiose Lorne Guyland, while Keitel became the volcanically touchy method actor Spunk Davis. The novel’s foul-mouthed narrator, John Self, is by British standards a horrible yob. But he’s a connected yob, who lands himself a directing job on a big-budget Hollywood movie. Dealing with the film’s fantastically uncivilised stars, Self discovers that class is a relative concept.

“I think snobbery is due for a bit of a comeback,” Amis wrote in 2007, when someone called him a snob. “Not the old shite to do with ‘class’,” he hastily explained. Rather, Amis was calling for a new snobbery, constructed around the values of literacy and reason.

“Sometimes snobbery is forced on you,” he wrote. “So let’s have a period of exaggerated respect for reason; and let’s look down on people who use language without respecting it.” Amis had no use for class in the old sense. But he also had no use for people who lacked class in any sense at all.

Brothers in arms: Patrick Schwarzenegger and Sam Nivola in The White Lotus.Credit: Fabio Lovino/HBO

A decade before his death, Amis moved to America. He lived long enough to witness the “cornily neon-lit vulgarity” of the first Trump administration, but died before Trump’s second coming. Nevertheless, Amis knew so much about class, and the lack of it, that he was able to describe certain features of the second Trump presidency in advance.

“What… Trump is telling us,” Amis warned in 2016, “is that roughly 50 per cent of Americans hanker for a political contender who a) knows nothing at all about politics, and b) won’t need to learn – because the old ‘politics’ will be rendered defunct on his first day in office.”

The current season of The White Lotus was shot before Trump’s election win in November. Cannily, though, Mike White slipped in a Trump subplot that would work either way, whether Trump won or lost. In episode 3, the brittle Kate (Leslie Bibb) revealed she was a Trump voter, scandalising her old friends Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) and Laurie (Carrie Coon). “I mean, Trump?” said Jaclyn. “Are you insane?”

If Trump had lost, those might have sounded like the words of a snob. Now that he’s won, America has worse things to worry about than snobbery.

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