Vile Bodies is a delightfully written satire about the desperately frivolous goings-on of the youth in 1920s England. I have not read a gossipy novel I enjoyed so much since I read Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, or before that, the Scarlett Pimpernel. A loosely-knit band of friends veers from drunken party to drunken brunch, careening wildly toward death, disgrace, or marriage, fueled largely by money conned or borrowed from friends or relatives. A book about nothing, that still manages to excite interest and sympathy for its dissolute “heroes.”