...laughing to death when reading VILE BODIES by Evelyn Waugh
It's characters are passive and do not really do anything, but they manage to have some terrible things happen to them!

..."masked parties, savage parties, Victorian parties,...parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes,...all that succession and repetition of massed humanity...all those vile bodies"...

And Adam's stories... a vivid portrait of how the upward mobile, socially conscious trendies are addicted in trying to be where it's cool, even when Adam invents people and visiting a lunatic asylum, gives them noble names and describes their ailments!...

unbelievably good:)