The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh

""It seems to me that Nature, like a lazy author, will round off abruptly into a short story what she obviously intended to be the opening of a novel,"" observes the Oxford-dropout narrator of ""A House of Gentlefolk,"" and the same might be said of a handful of the 40-odd short pieces in this lavishly entertaining collection that resemble sketches and false starts toward longer works. Among them are two intriguing chapters of Work Suspended, a novel that Waugh abandoned in the mid-1940s, and his Oxford writings and juvenilia. But at his best, Waugh is a blazing practitioner of the short story, for it proves an ideal framework for a style that eschews the psychoanalytical investigations of modernist writers like Joyce or Woolf for taut social commentary, stylized characters and hilarious, dramatic conceits. Few aspects of life in England between the wars escape Waugh's blistering attention, be they the colonial blunderings of innocents abroad, the manners of genteel country families or the antics of his own peers, such as the supercilious Bright Young Thing in ""Out of Depth"" who antagonizes a magician he meets at a London dinner party and is transported to the 25th century. Waugh loves visiting cruelties upon his characters, like the cuckolded London dilettante in ""The Man Who Liked Dickens"" who funds an ill-fated expedition to the Amazon, is imprisoned by a Kurtz-like chief and forced to read Dickens to his captor. His misanthropy notwithstanding, Waugh is so adept at punchy openings, deadpan zingers and wickedly ironic situations, and so graceful is his use of language, that this volume should serve, at a time of renewed interest in the short story, as primer on the infinite possibilities of the form. (Sept.)