SHAKESPEARE WROTE FOR MONEY

An excellent Christmas gift from S and the last (sniff!) of Nick Hornby’s fabulous “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns for The Believer (after The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt). Hornby is such a smart and entertaining nonfiction writer, I’ll gladly read his descriptions of just about anything, from soccer (Fever Pitch) to songs (Songbook), but he is, foremost, a reader after my own heart—full of both joy and exasperation at how many books there are in the world, sometimes doubting and rationalizing and restrategizing his course, sometimes following his curiosity, both enjoying and lamenting the way one book can unexpectedly lead you to another and another. Even though I’ve read very few of the books he writes about, I can completely identify with his meditations on reading in general, and I’ll miss his comfortable, casual Believer voice (with its hilarious running-gag allusions to the magazine’s editorial board, “the Polysyllabic Spree, the forty-seven literature-loving, unnervingly even-tempered yet unsmiling young men and women who remove all the good jokes from this column every month”).

CORALINE

I saw the movie a few months ago and really liked it, so of course I had to track down the book and see what was different. As usual, the book was better, although the amazing animation in the movie (which made the Other Mother even more terrifying than Neil Gaiman’s description) makes it a closer call than you might expect. The movie does have one huge difference, however: it adds a male friend for Coraline who (although he does serve a few interesting functions in the story) ends up detracting from her independence/bravery/self-reliance as shown in the book. I don’t think it was as much of a “Why does the strong female character have to get saved by a boy?” travesty as some fans of the book would have you believe, but I’m not sure such a big change was necessary. The book didn’t blow me away, but it was efficient and nicely Gothic-creepy, and had a great central character. This was my first Gaiman book (I know) and I’ll probably seek out more down the road.

2008 IN BOOKS

Thanks to Reading Project ’08, I read a decent number of books last year (I don’t have the exact figure right now, but it was more than in 2007), most of them fiction (I tried to make my top-10 lists but quit when I realized I had a dozen novels on one list and only one nonfiction book, Bonk, on the other). Technically I’m still working on Reading Project 2008, since I’m only halfway through the Jeeves and Bertie oeuvre, and that’s not the only reason I’ve decided against doing an official Reading Project ’09. There are currently 67 books on my library to-be-read list and at least a dozen unread volumes piled up on top of my bookshelf, not to mention all the books I keep swearing I’m going to reread, so I’m going to spend the year concentrating on whittling down some of that backlog. Several of my TBRs were inspired by Reading Project ’08, so there’ll be some fun little echoes here and there. It would be great if I could manage five books a month (that’s one per week, plus a little extra one crammed in here and there, which is totally doable as long as you read a lot of slender YA literature) and then blog about it in neat little increments, but we’ll see. I know that model will completely break down if I decide to revisit Dickens. Or if I travel, or start spending more time with my friends, fulfill my resolution to get a decent amount of sleep every night, or generally have a life. But luckily for you, since I spent January in a state of near-hiding, I did read five books and intend to tell you about them the next time I post.

Speaking of books: if you ever read the Little House series (and if you didn't, log off right now and get thee to a library), be sure to catch Half-Pint Ingalls’ updates on Twitter! Sample: “No Ma, I didn’t mean the squiggles of candy syrup I poured in the snow to look like they spell out I HATE YOU BABY CARRIE.”

JOY IN THE MORNING

Background: Published in 1947 (U.S. title was Jeeves in the Morning)

This is the one where: Bertie must deal with “the super-sticky affair of Nobby Hopwood, Stilton Cheesewright, Florence Craye, my Uncle Percy, J. Chichester Clam, Edwin the Boy Scout, and old Boko Fittlesworth—or, as my biographers will probably call it, the Steeple Bumpleigh Horror.”

The action takes place at: Bumpleigh Hall, Steeple Bumpleigh, Hampshire

Bertie accidentally gets engaged to: Florence Craye, Uncle Percy’s daughter, a novelist, “one of those intellectual girls, steeped to the gills in serious purpose, who are unable to see a male soul without wanting to get behind it and shove…I had always felt that she was like someone training on to be an aunt”

But she’s really in love with: G. D’Arcy “Stilton” Cheesewright, a policeman (“That beefy frame…That pumpkin-shaped head….The face that looked like a slab of pink dough”)

The task at hand: Help Uncle Percy negotiate a secret merger with American shipping magnate J. Chichester Clam, get Uncle Percy’s permission for Nobby to marry Boko Fittlesworth

Other characters include:

• Aunt Agatha, “my tough aunt, the one who eats broken glass and conducts human sacrifices by the light of the full moon”

• Percival, Lord Worpleson, Aunt Agatha’s second husband, a shipping magnate (“In disposition akin to a more than ordinarily short-tempered snapping turtle, he resembled in appearance a malevolent Aubrey Smith, and usually, when one encountered him, gave the impression of being just about to foam at the mouth…. Given the choice between him and a hippogriff as a companion for a walking tour, I would have picked the hippogriff every time”)

• Edwin, Worpleson’s son, “as pestilential a stripling as ever wore khaki shirts and went spooring or whatever it is that these Boy Scouts do”

• Zenobia “Nobby” Hopwood, Worpleson’s ward, “a girl liberally endowed with oomph”

• George Webster “Boko” Fittlesworth, a writer “with a face like an intellectual parrot. Furthermore, as is the case with so many of the younger literati, he dresses like a tramp cyclist, affecting turtleneck sweaters and grey flannel bags with a patch on the knee and conveying a general suggestion of having been left out in the rain overnight in an ash can”

Bertie’s trials and tribulations include: Having his rental cottage (“Wee Nooke”) burnt down by Edwin, nearly having to break into Bumpleigh Hall, being hit on the head by Edwin, having to wear a stolen policeman’s uniform to the East Wibley fancy-dress ball and nearly being arrested for it

Jeeves disapproves of Bertie’s: Reluctance to take a summer cottage in Steeple Bumpleigh so that Jeeves can go fishing (although this isn’t much of a conflict, as Jeeves gets his way before the end of Chapter 4)

First paragraph: “After the thing was all over, when peril had ceased to loom and happy endings had been distributed in heaping handfuls and we were driving home with our hats on the side of our heads, having shaken the dust of Steeple Bumpleigh from our tires, I confessed to Jeeves that there had been moments during the recent proceedings when Bertram Wooster, though no weakling, had come very near to despair.”

Bertie fashion moment: Bertie excitedly purchases a Sindbad the Sailor costume (“Not forgetting the ginger whiskers that go with it”) for the fancy-dress ball, but does not get to wear it

Slang I’d like to start using: “As a dancer I out-Fred the nimblest Astaire”

Bertie gets no respect: “My best friends would have warned me what would come of letting a lunatic like you loose in the place. I ought to have guessed that the first thing you would do—before so much as unpacking—would be to set the whole damned premises ablaze.”—Uncle Percy (mistakenly believing Bertie is the one responsible for burning down Wee Nooke)

Best Jeeves moment: “I emerged from a profound reverie to discover that Jeeves was in my midst. I had had no inkling of his approach, but then one very often hasn’t. He has a way of suddenly materializing at one’s side like one of those Indian blokes who shoot their astral bodies to and fro, going into thin air in Rangoon and reassembling the parts in Calcutta. I think it’s done with mirrors.”

Best bit of description: “Boko looked at me, and raised his eyebrows. I looked at Boko, and raised my eyebrows. Nobby looked at us both, and raised her eyebrows. Then we looked at Stilton, and all raised our eyebrows. It was one of those big eyebrow-raising mornings.”

Best bit of dialogue:
Bertie: “I’ll be dashed if I’m going to be made a—what’s the word?”
Jeeves: “Sir?”
Bertie: “Catspaw. Though why catspaw? I mean, what have cats go to do with it?”
Jeeves: “The expression derives from the old story of the cat, the monkey, and the chestnuts, sir. It appears—”
Bertie: “Skip it, Jeeves. This is no time for chewing the fat about the animal kingdom. And if it’s the story about where the monkey puts the nuts, I know it and it’s very vulgar.”

My review: Four stars. Plenty of Wodehousian style, but even less substance than usual. My beloved Aunt Dahlia is absent, ubervillain Aunt Agatha barely makes an appearance, and while Uncle Percy ends up being pretty funny and Edwin is suitably annoying (the best part of the book is when Bertie gets to give him a well-deserved kick in the pants), the two couples (Florence and Stilton, Nobby and Boko) are bland, at least compared to Gussie Fink-Nottle or Madeline Bassett. The plot was amusing but could have been twistier. Didn’t love it, but still liked it plenty.

Had I read it before? I don’t think so. Stilton, Florence, and Edwin were familiar to me from the short stories, but Nobby and Boko didn’t ring a bell.

Next up: The Mating Season

THE CODE OF THE WOOSTERS

Background: Published in 1938.

This is the one where: Bertie deals with “the sinister affair of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, old Pop Bassett, Stiffy Byng, the Rev. H. P. (‘Stinker’) Pinker, the eighteenth-century cow-creamer and the small, brown, leather-covered notebook.” Of course, if you’re a big Jeeves & Wooster fan, “cow-creamer” is probably all you needed to hear.

The action takes place at: Totleigh Towers, Totleigh-in-the-Wold, Gloucestershire, the home of Sir Watkyn Bassett

Bertie accidentally nearly gets engaged to:

• Madeline Bassett, AGAIN (“A droopy, soupy, sentimental exhibit, with melting eyes and a cooing voice and most extraordinary views on such things as stars and rabbits.…That squashy soupiness of hers, that subtle air she had of being on the point of talking baby-talk. It was that that froze the blood. She was definitely the sort of girl who puts her hands over a husband’s eyes, as he is crawling in to breakfast with a morning head, and says: ‘Guess who!’”)

• Stephanie “Stiffy” Byng, Madeline’s cousin (“Stiffy’s map, as a rule, tends to be rather grave and dreamy, giving the impression that she is thinking deep, beautiful thoughts. Quite misleading, of course. I don’t suppose she would recognize a deep, beautiful thought if you handed it to her on a skewer with tartare sauce.”)

But she’s really in love with:

• In Madeline’s case, Gussie Fink-Nottle (“a fish-faced pal of mine who, on reaching man’s estate, had buried himself in the country and devoted himself entirely to the study of newts…A confirmed recluse you would have called him, if you had happened to know the word, and you would have been right. By all the rulings of the form book, a less promising prospect for the whispering of tender words into shell-like ears and the subsequent purchase of platinum ring and license for wedding it would have seemed impossible to discover in a month of Sundays.”)

• In Stiffy’s case: The Reverend Harold “Stinker” Pinker (“a large, lumbering, Newfoundland puppy of a chap—full of zeal, yes: always doing his best, true; but never quite able to make the grade; a man, in short, who if there was a chance of bungling an enterprise and landing himself in the soup, would snatch at it.”)
  

The task at hand: Steal the cow-creamer for Bertie’s Uncle Tom, recover the notebook in which Gussie has written insults about Sir Watkyn Bassett and Roderick Spode, reunite Gussie and Madeline, and get Sir Watkyn’s permission for Stiffy to marry Stinker

Other characters include:

• Aunt Dahlia (Bertie first describes her as “my good and deserving aunt, not to be confused with Aunt Agatha, who eats broken bottles and wears barbed wire next to the skin.” After she pressures him to steal the cow-creamer, however, he changes his tune: “It is no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.”)

• Sir Watkyn Bassett, a retired magistrate who once fined Bertie for stealing a policeman’s helmet; also Madeline’s father (“Slice him where you like, a hellhound is always a hellhound.”)

• Roderick Spode, Bassett’s friend and the leader of a quasi-fascist group called the Black Shorts (“About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.”)

• The dog Bartholomew, Stiffy’s Aberdeen terrier (“Reluctant as one always is to criticize the acts of an all-wise Providence, I was dashed if I could see why a dog of his size should have been fitted out with the jaws and teeth of a crocodile.”)

• Constable Eustace Oates (“In describing this public servant as ugly, she was undoubtedly technically correct. Only if the competition had consisted of Sir Watkyn Bassett, Oofy Prosser of the Drones, and a few more fellows like that, could he have hoped to win success in a beauty contest.”)
  

Bertie’s trials and tribulations include: Being constantly suspected of theft (of, variously, an umbrella, the cow creamer, and yet another policeman’s helmet) by Sir Watkyn (which culminates in Bertie being locked in his room and nearly hauled off to jail), being treed atop a chest of drawers by Bartholomew

Jeeves disapproves of Bertie’s: Unwillingness to go on a round-the-world cruise

First paragraph: “I reached out a hand from under the blankets, and rang the bell for Jeeves.
‘Good evening, Jeeves.’
‘Good morning, sir.’
This surprised me.”

Bertie fashion moment: “I slid into the shirt, and donned the knee-length under-wear…I groaned a hollow one, and shoved on the trousers…The blow was a severe one, and it was with a quivering hand that I now socked the feet.”

Slang I’d like to start using: “Rannygazoo,” which I can only assume means something similar to “hullaballoo” (“I lit a cigarette and proceeded to stress the moral lesson to be learned from all this rannygazoo.”)

Bertie gets no respect:

• “Hello, ugly.”—Aunt Dahlia

• “It’s an extraordinary thing—every time I see you, you appear to be recovering from some debauch. Don’t you ever stop drinking? How about when you are asleep?”—Aunt Dahlia

Best Jeeves moment: “Presently I was aware that Jeeves was with me. I hadn’t heard him come in, but you often don’t with Jeeves. He just streams silently from spot A to spot B, like some gas.”

Best bit of description: The silver cow-creamer: “It was a silver cow. But when I say ‘cow,’ don’t go running away with the idea of some decent, self-respecting cudster such as you may observe loading grass into itself in the nearest meadow. This was a sinister, leering, Underworld sort of animal, the kind that would spit out of the side of its mouth for twopence…The sight of it seemed to take me into a different and dreadful world.”

Best bit of dialogue:
Madeline: “You know your Shelley, Bertie.”
Bertie: “Oh, am I?”

My review: Five stars! This is perhaps the classic Jeeves novel, containing many of the series’ most memorable characters (Gussie, Madeline, Spode with his “Eulalie” secret), details (the cow-creamer, the menacing Bartholomew, the policeman’s helmet), and lines (“I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled”). Practically perfect in every way.

Had I read it before? Yes, many times. My parents own it, and I vividly remember my father reading it aloud to me when I was a kid. I was not exactly sure what a cow-creamer was, and yet I still thought it was hilarious.

Next up: Joy in the Morning

THE WORDY SHIPMATES

Overall, I didn’t enjoy Sarah Vowell’s latest historical romp as much as Assassination Vacation, but here is a choice quote:

Because of the “city upon a hill” sound bite, “A Model of Christian Charity” is one of the formative documents outlining the idea of America. But dig deep into its communitarian ethos and it reads more like an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. Of course, this America does exist. It’s called Canada.

DID YOU KNOW YOUNG ALAN GREENSPAN PLAYED PROFESSIONAL CLARINET IN A TRAVELING JAZZ BAND?

Do you dork out about history? For instance, did you have ever a crush on an historical figure? I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it here before, but what first attracted me to A was the fact that he uncannily resembled the sultry portrait of Christopher Marlowe I took a fancy to in my high-school English textbook (A is not that sultry, but I still see the likeness in the eyes and hair). I’ve also frequently been heard to state that Alexander Hamilton is smokin’ hot on the $10 bill. Or have you ever found a long-dead personality so inexplicably hilarious or endearing that you been unable to resist sharing choice anecdotes about him or her with everyone you meet, or constructing elaborate jokes about him/her with your friends? In college, K and I would gossip about the Elizabethans as though they were characters on our favorite soap (I was a particular fan of Sir Phillip Sidney and—for comedic value—Sir Walter Raleigh), and later our fandom shifted to the Founding Fathers. My previous job, in which I edited collective biographies of all sorts of historical figures, was just one such obsession after another. Over long months of fact-checking, photo research, writing and rewriting, layout, and proofreading, I became personally fond of a whole series of greats, including strangely cuddly John Maynard Keynes, crazy fake-nosed Tycho Brahe, doomed hottie Robert F. Kennedy, good old chick magnet/awe-inspiring genius Ben Franklin, and sweet, tragic Alan Turing.

If you’re at all like me, it will behoove you to read the cute and clever comics of Kate Beaton immediately. Beaton’s takes on historical figures are a perfect mix of the silly and the intellectual. It takes a smart and talented person to create whimsical historical fantasies that still ring true—maybe not strictly factually, but emotionally true. I’ve edited a book about the history of computers, so I can vouch that Charles Babbage really did have a bizarre hatred of street musicians; Beaton takes this odd fact to his logical conclusion by having his wife Georgina wonder, “Does he have to make a big spectacle about it every time we go out?” Similarly, Nikola Tesla really was celibate, and although there’s no evidence suggesting that frenzied screaming ladies were throwing their bloomers up on stage when he demonstrated electricity, wouldn’t it be awesome if they had?

What unfailingly cracks me up about history is that it’s just so big and crazy and yet so ordinary and human, and I feel that (like Sarah Vowell in Assassination Vacation) Beaton gets that too. Washington decides to “Cross the shit over the Delaware.” Maud Gonne complains to Yeats, “It’s just another faggy poem.” Orwell says of Animal Farm, “Seriously that book is going to rule so hard.” Charles of Austria woos Queen Elizabeth I with a song that goes, “Your hairrr is like a giant muffin.” James Cook fatally taunts the Hawaiians, “You can’t kill me! I’m too busy banging your chicks.” Admiral Nelson goes on a date: “I’d smile at you more but I have no teeth. There’s that ‘shot in the face’ thing again.” Jane Austen copes with her fans (“This novel is a social commentary.” “Is it a social commentary about hunky dreamboats?”). Teddy Roosevelt wins the Nobel Peace Prize (“Russia, Japan, must you kill each other so? We can negotiate! Or, if you want to, we can safari.” “Fuck it let’s do both!”). Fat King George IV fears “a sexy revolution” and envisions James Monroe showing off his hot ass (“Goodness I have dropped the Constitution…let me get that”). But lest I give away all the punchlines, let me just say that my all-time favorite is the Mary Shelley one and the runner-up is the one about St. Francis. Happy reading!

VARIOUS AND SUNDRY

Reading Project Update: I’m making slow but steady progress through the Wodehouse bio, which is interesting but pretty dense. I’ve got just over 100 pages to go and have made it a priority to finish before I leave for my Thanksgiving trip to D.C., so I can read The Code of the Woosters on the plane. I always want something light (both physically and emotionally) and super-fascinating for my travel reading, and I spend a lot of mental energy planning the perfect books to bring on a trip. I have a secret terror of being trapped somewhere without something good to read. This is why I would bring half a dozen books on an overnight trip when I was a kid—of course I knew I’d only have time to read a few of them, but I required access to a wide selection. This is also probably why one of my childhood fantasies was being locked in a bookstore overnight. And why in middle school I thought being in prison wouldn’t be so bad, as long as there was a well-stocked library. Now that I’ve seen Oz and graduated to actually enjoying fresh air and physical movement, I’ve rejected that last idea, but I still carefully strategize about which books to pack in my carry-on bag…and I still usually bring way too many, although now this seems like good common sense, given the state of air transportation today. I pray to never be stuck on a runway for six hours, but I hope that if it happens, I’ll at least be reading something awesome.

Since the end of the year is when all those “Best American Whatever Writing” collections come out, that makes choosing books for holiday travel a no-brainer. Anthologies are perfect travel reading—if you don’t like one story, just turn a few pages and you’ll find something entirely different. It’s basically like having a magazine but looking smarter. Thus, my other reading selections for the Thanksgiving trip will be The Best American Crime Reporting 2007 and Best Food Writing 2007 (yeah, the 2008 books are already coming out, but these are new to me—my library’s painfully slow in acquiring the latest entries in the series I like). I’m pretty pleased about the prospects, but my flights still better go smoothly. Even a good book can only pass the time for so long.

I’m also doing the Mr. Burns “Exxxxcellent” finger-tenting gesture because I managed (through my mad hold-list skillz) to snag a library copy of Sarah Vowell’s brand-new book about Puritans, The Wordy Shipmates. I’ve only read the first few pages, but I have no doubt I’ll enjoy it.

And finally, I just finished reading two stellar young-adult novels that should be just as appealing to real adults: The Green Glass Sea and White Sands, Red Menace, by Ellen Klages. They combine a number of my favorite book elements: an interesting historical setting (in this case, the Manhattan Project during World War II in the first book, and the early postwar rocketry program in the second), strong female characters, unlikely friendships, kids who are smart without being annoyingly precocious, and people who have rich interior lives with interesting hobbies/obsessions/fields of expertise. The details of the time period are effortlessly drawn, the books are chock-full of social history and science and engineering and art, and I loved the adorably brainy characters. It’s surprisingly rare to find a work of fiction about smart people that is actually smart itself (just one of the many that fails to pull it off: the movie Smart People). I can only hope that Klages is planning another book in the series.

RIGHT HO, JEEVES

Background: Published in 1934, just seven months after Thank You, Jeeves. The original U.S. title was Brinkley Manor.

This is the one where: Bertie thinks that Jeeves’ problem-solving powers are slipping and attempts to deal on his own with “the complex case of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, my Cousin Angela, my Aunt Dahlia, my Uncle Thomas, young Tuppy Glossop, and the cook, Anatole”

The action takes place at: Brinkley Court, Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia’s house in Worcestershire (near the town of Market Snodsbury)

Bertie accidentally gets engaged to: Madeline Bassett—or, as he refers to her, “the Bassett” (“I don’t want to wrong anybody, so I won’t go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don’t sometimes feel that the stars are God’s daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.”)

But she’s really in love with: Augustus “Gussie” Fink-Nottle, who is reclusive, obsessed with newts, drinks only orange juice, and “wears horn-rimmed spectacles and has a face like a fish” (“Nobody could love a freak like Gussie except a similar freak like the Bassett… A splendid chap, of course, in many ways—courteous, amiable, and just the fellow to tell you what to do till the doctor came, if you had a sick newt on your hands—but…I have no doubt that you could have flung bricks by the hour in England’s most densely-populated districts without endangering the safety of a single girl capable of becoming Mrs. Augustus Fink-Nottle without an anaesthetic.”)

The task at hand: Give away the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School (or, as Bertie says to Aunt Dahlia, “strew prizes at this bally Dotheboys Hall of yours”—yay for Nicholas Nickleby allusions!); mend the rift between Cousin Angela and Tuppy Glossop; help Gussie propose to Madeline; get Uncle Tom to give Aunt Dahlia more money to print her magazine, Milady’s Boudoir (she has gambled away 500 pounds playing baccarat in Cannes); keep the brilliant but temperamental chef Anatole from quitting

Other characters include:

• Hildebrand “Tuppy” Glossop (“In build and appearance, Tuppy somewhat resembles a bulldog, and his aspect now was that of one of these fine animals who has just been refused a slice of cake.”)

• Cousin Angela Travers (“This cousin and I had been meeting freely since the days when I wrote sailor suits and she hadn’t any front teeth, yet only now was I beginning to get onto her hidden depths. A simply, jolly, kindly young pimple she had always struck me as—the sort you could more or less rely on not to hurt a fly. But here she was now laughing heartlessly…like something cold and callous out of a sophisticated talkie”)

• Aunt Dahlia Travers (“If Aunt Dahlia has a fault, it is that she is apt to address a vis-à-vis as if he were somebody half a mile away whom she had observed riding over hounds. A throwback, no doubt, to the time when she counted a day lost that was not spent chivvying some unfortunate fox over the countryside.”)

• Uncle Tom Travers (“all those years he spent making millions in the Far East put his digestion on the blink, and the only cook that has ever been discovered capable of pushing food into him without starting something like Old Home Week in Moscow under the third waistcoat button is this uniquely gifted Anatole”)

• Anatole (“This wizard of the cooking-stove is a tubby little man with a moustache of the outsize or soup-strainer type, and you can generally take a line through it as to the state of his emotions. When all is well, it turns up at the ends like a sergeant-major’s. When the soul is bruised, it droops.”)
  

Bertie’s trials and tribulations include: Being chased around a park bench by an angry Tuppy, being insulted by a drunken Gussie during the school prize-giving, having to bicycle 18 miles in the middle of the night, and suffering the company of Madeline Bassett (“I could not but remember how often, when in her company at Cannes, I had gazed dumbly at her, wishing that some kindly motorist in a racing car would ease the situation by coming along and ramming her amindships”).

Jeeves disapproves of Bertie’s: white mess jacket with brass buttons, which Bertie has brought back from Cannes. (To Bertie’s assertion that such jackets are all the rage in Cannes, Jeeves replies, “The code at Continental casinos is notoriously lax, sir.”) The jacket meets its fate when Jeeves “accidentally” leaves the iron on it too long.

First paragraph:
“‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘may I speak frankly?’
‘Certainly, sir.’
‘What I have to say may wound you.’
‘Not at all, sir.’
‘Well, then—’
No—wait. Hold the line a minute. I’ve gone off the rails.”

Bertie fashion moment: None, but he makes several proud mentions of having written an article for Milady’s Boudoir on “What the Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing”

Slang I’d like to start using: Bertie’s jaunty abbreviations; for example, “I could see at a g. that the unfortunate affair had got in amongst her in no uncertain manner. Her usually cheerful map was clouded, and the genial smile conspic. by its a.”

Bertie gets no respect:

• “Ask anyone who knows me, and they will tell you that after two months of my company, what the normal person feels is that that will about do for the present. Indeed, I have known people who couldn’t stick it out for more than a few days.”—Bertie

• “I wonder, Bertie…if you have the faintest conception how perfectly loathsome you look? A cross between an orgy scene in the movies and some low form of pond life.”—Aunt Dahlia, to a hungover Bertie

• “I am not pulling your leg. Nothing would induce me to touch your beastly leg.”—Aunt Dahlia

• “I might have known that some hideous disaster would strike this house like a thunderbolt if once you wriggled your way into it and started trying to be clever.”—Aunt Dahlia again, handily summarizing the plot of just about every Bertie Wooster story

• “Ass,” “maddening half-wit,” “fathead,” “greedy young pig,” “idiot nephew,” “treacherous worm and contemptible, spineless cowardly custard,” “abysmal chump,” “dithering idiot”—also Aunt Dahlia

• “To look at you, one would think you were just an ordinary sort of amiable idiot—certifiable, perhaps, but quite harmless. Yet, in reality, you are a worse scourge than the Black Death. I tell you, Bertie, when I contemplate you I seem to come up against all the underlying sorrow and horror of life with such a thud that I feel as if I had walked into a lamp post.”—a final coup de grace from Aunt Dahlia

Best Jeeves moment: “I shot a glance at Jeeves. He allowed his right eyebrow to flicker slightly, which is as near as he ever gets to a display of the emotions.”

Best bit of description: “Conditions being as they were at Brinkley Court—I mean to say, the place being loaded down above the Plimsoll mark with aching hearts and standing room only as regarded tortured souls—I hadn’t expected the evening meal to be particularly effervescent. Nor was it. Silent. Sombre. The whole thing more than a bit like Christmas dinner on Devil’s Island…What with having, on top of her other troubles, to rein herself back from the trough, Aunt Dahlia was a total loss as far as anything in the shape of brilliant badinage was concerned. The fact that he was fifty quid in the red and expecting Civilization to take a toss at any moment had caused Uncle Tom, who always looked a bit like a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow, to take on a deeper melancholy. The Bassett was a silent bread crumbler. Angela might have been hewn from the living rock. Tuppy had the air of a condemned murderer refusing to make the usual hearty breakfast before tooling off to the execution shed. And as for Gussie Fink-Nottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming him on sight.”

Best bit of dialogue: Madeline Bassett: “Don’t you love this time of evening, Mr. Wooster, when the sun has gone to bed and all the bunnies come out to have their little suppers? When I was a child, I used to think that rabbits were gnomes, and that if I held my breath and stayed quite still, I should see a fairy queen.”

My review: Five stars! This one includes all my favorite characters from the Bertieverse—awesome Aunt Dahlia (who, despite her bluster, is usually quite cheerful and has an affectionate relationship with Bertie), hilariously drippy Madeline Bassett, cringe-worthy Gussie Fink-Nottle, and Anatole, whose cooking inspires reverence and whose allegiance is the center of many Wodehouse plots. In contrast to Thank You, Jeeves, where most of the characters seemed to hate Bertie and I felt a bit sorry for him, he fares much better in this one, serving more as an inept advisor to his friends and family and an audience to the hijinks rather than as a victim (except at the end, when, as usual, Jeeves’ scheme to solve everyone’s problems requires a sacrifice from Bertie—in this case, a long and unnecessary bicycle ride in the dark). The plot was funnier, the characters were more vivid, and even the language seemed to sparkle more brilliantly; as you can see, I had difficulty restraining myself from quoting the entire book to you. This one is definitely required reading for Wodehouse fans and a good intro for newbies.

Had I read it before? Definitely yes. My parents own it (in fact the edition that I got from the Pasadena library happened to be the exact same cover and everything), so my father read it to me when I was a kid and I read it myself at least once or twice while growing up. But it has been at least ten years since my last reading, and since I didn’t remember how the plot worked itself out, it still felt fresh to me this time around. Wodehouse bears much rereading, especially when you are older and can better understand the slang and literary allusions.

Next up: The Code of the Woosters

THANK YOU, JEEVES

The joy of Wodehouse novels is also the problem with Wodehouse novels: they are richly inventive, encompassing hundreds of eccentric characters who intertwine in intricate ways via wild coincidences and crazy hijinks; yet at the same time, they are repetitive and formulaic (basic plot structure: Bertie visits a country house and tries to help a friend or relative with some nutty scheme; there are romantic mix-ups and Bertie ends up involuntarily engaged; Bertie thinks he knows better than Jeeves and tries to fix the situation on his own; Jeeves swoops in to save the day at the last minute; meanwhile, Bertie and Jeeves disagree over some possession or habit of Bertie’s, such as an article of clothing, and Jeeves wins out in the end, ridding Bertie of the offending object).

This means the Jeeves and Bertie oeuvre can get confusing. Even the titles are easy to conflate: there's Thank You, Jeeves; Right Ho, Jeeves; Carry On, Jeeves; and Very Good, Jeeves for starters, plus the fact that some of the books have two titles—one for the British version, another for the American edition. I know I’ve read all the short stories, because I own the complete collection in an omnibus edition, but I’m less sure about the novels. Have I read most of them but just can’t recall the details or tell them apart? Or have I just read the same few over and over again?

That’s why I wanted to read them all in order. Wodehouse books are fun to reread, because they’re so complicated that even if you’ve read them already you probably don’t remember how everything gets resolved. Also, I am a completist. What if all these years I’ve been missing out on some Jeeves books and didn’t even know it? Sacrilege! To highlight the differences between the books and help myself keep them straight, I’ve developed the following handy template that distills the Jeeves-Wooster formula (as I remember it, anyway) into its essential elements. Unless Wodehouse got experimental in the later novels, I’m guessing it will prove applicable to all 10 books I’m planning to read. (There are actually 11 Jeeves novels, but I'm skipping The Return of Jeeves because (a) I read it last year and (b) Bertie isn't in it.)

Background: Published in 1934, Thank You, Jeeves was the first full-length Jeeves novel after numerous short stories dating back to 1917.

This is the one where: Jeeves quits Bertie’s employment; Bertie rents a cottage in the country

The action takes place at: Chuffnell Hall (the home of Bertie’s friend Chuffy, in Chuffnell Regis, Somersetshire)

Bertie accidentally gets engaged to: Pauline Stoker, an American heiress (“Unquestionably an eyeful, Pauline Stoker had the grave defect of being one of those girls who want you to come and swim a mile before breakfast and rout you out when you are trying to catch a wink of sleep after lunch for a merry five sets of tennis.”)

But she’s really in love with: Bertie’s land-rich, cash-poor friend Chuffy (aka Marmaduke, the fifth baron Chuffnell)

The task at hand: Persuade J. Washburn Stoker to buy Chuffnell Hall and give it to Sir Roderick Glossop so he can open a mental institution, thus giving Chuffy enough money to marry Pauline

Bertie’s antagonists include:

• Pauline’s father, J. Washburn Stoker, “who bears a striking resemblance to something out of the book of Revelations”

• Sir Roderick Glossop, “A bald-domed, bushy-browed blighter, ostensibly a nerve specialist, but in reality, as everybody knows, nothing more nor less than a high-priced loony doctor, he has been cropping up in my path for years, always with the most momentous results.” Glossop thinks Bertie is insane and has convinced Stoker likewise, giving us this nice shout-out to the earlier Jeeves stories: “He would have touched, no doubt, on the incident of the cats and the fish in my bedroom; possibly, also, on the episode of the stolen hat and my habit of climbing down water-spouts: winding up, it may be, with a description of the unfortunate affair of the punctured water-bottle at Lady Wickham’s.”

• Sergeant Voules: “This Voules was a bird built rather on the lines of the Albert Hall, round in the middle and not much above. He always looked to me as if Nature had really intended to make two police sergeants and had forgotten to split them up.”

• Brinkley, Bertie’s new valet, an apparent Communist who gets drunk, chases Bertie with a knife, burns down Bertie’s cottage, and gives Glossop a black eye by throwing a potato at him

Bertie’s trials and tribulations include: Being repeatedly harassed by neighborhood policemen, being chased by his knife-wielding valet, being imprisoned on a yacht by J.W. Stoker, disguising himself in blackface and then being unable to remove it, trying to sleep in a variety of uncomfortable locations (a car, a potting shed, a summerhouse), and missing breakfast.

Jeeves disapproves of Bertie’s: banjolele (which meets its end in the fire that destroys Bertie’s cottage, paving the way for Jeeves to return to Bertie’s employment)

First paragraph: “I was a shade perturbed. Nothing to signify, really, but still just a spot concerned. As I sat in the old flat, idly touching the strings of my banjolele, an instrument to which I had become greatly addicted of late, you couldn’t have said that the brow was actually furrowed, and yet, on the other hand, you couldn’t have stated absolutely that it wasn’t. Perhaps the word ‘pensive’ about covers it. It seemed to me that a situation fraught with embarrassing potentialities had arisen.”

Bertie fashion moment: “I confess that it was in somber mood that I assembled the stick, the hat, and the lemon-colored gloves some half-hour later and strode out into the streets of London.” (Runner-up: “Reading from left to right, the contents of the bed consisted of Pauline Stoker in my heliotrope pajamas with the old gold stripe.”)

Slang I’d like to start using: [Of a positive event] “Well, this has certainly put the butter on the spinach.”

Bertie gets no respect:

• “There’s a sort of woolly-headed duckiness about you.”—Pauline Stoker

• “Mr. Wooster, miss, is, perhaps, mentally somewhat negligible, but he has a heart of gold.”—Jeeves

• “Anyway, you’re not the gibbering idiot I thought you at one time, I’m glad to say.”—J.W. Stoker

Best Jeeves moment: “I became aware of somebody coughing softly at my side like a respectful sheep trying to attract the attention of its shepherd, and how can I describe with what thankfulness and astonishment I perceived Jeeves.”

Best bit of description: “His voice died away with a sort of sound not unlike the last utterance of one of those toy ducks you inflate and then let the air out of. His jaw had dropped, and he was staring at the cable as if he had suddenly discovered he was fondling a tarantula. The next moment there proceeded from his lips an observation which even in these lax modern times I should certainly not have considered suitable for mixed company.”

Best bit of dialogue: Chuffy to Pauline: “I’m broke. You’re broke. Let’s rush off and get married.”

My review: The book was fairly enjoyable, but it suffered from a dated plot point involving blackface, which is difficult be amused by nowadays. It was even harder to overlook the frequent, though innocently intended, use of the n-word in reference to a group of minstrel-show performers (they never actually appear in the book, but are frequently mentioned as performing in the area—and rather cutely, Bertie hopes to consult their banjo player for pointers). Thus I've awarded the book just three stars. Still, there’s plenty to like here. The banjolele subplot and the subsequent rift between Jeeves and Bertie is hilarious, as is the scene where Pauline shows up unexpectedly in Bertie’s bed (Bertie was actually intentionally engaged to her in a past story, and I found her character much more sympathetic/appealing than most of the women Bertie gets entangled with).

Had I read it before? I think so, but not repeatedly. A lot of the plot details seemed familiar (Jeeves quitting, the cottage, the yacht, the minstrel show, the banjo), but it seems like I would have remembered the n-word stuff more vividly...unless somehow I read a censored/altered edition before? Or am I just remembering seeing this episode of the (brilliant, BRILLIANT) Stephen Fry/Hugh Laurie TV adaptation (where the banjo was changed to a trombone, as I recall)?

Next up: Right Ho, Jeeves