I retired in late 2024 and the first thing I did after going through the Medicare wringer was to head down to the basement and start going through some of the hundreds of books I've carted around since the 1970s with the express purpose of reading in my retirement (which some part of me thought would never actually happen). Back in 1980, I read my first P.G. Wodehouse novel, Full Moon, and pretty much laughed out loud through the whole thing. I read a few more of his books over the years but realized when I went to the basement in December 2024 that I had about ten volumes of Wodehouse that I had never read (or didn't remember reading--more on that later), so I've been working my way through them ever since, and finding a few more at the public library.
Wodehouse was a British writer known best in popular culture for creating the characters of Bertie Wooster, a youngish upper-class fellow who doesn't have to work and therefore gets involved in all kinds of trouble, and his long-suffering valet Jeeves. There have been over a dozen novels or story collections featuring Jeeves and Wooster, not to mention movies, TV shows (with Hugh Laurie as Bertie and Stephen Fry as Jeeves, pictured below, and they are so perfect that I still always picture them when I read the stories), and later novels written in homage. But Wodehouse, in addition to co-authoring several hit plays, also had other characters he wrote about who basically existed in the Jeeves universe. Full Moon was one of several Blandings Castle books featuring Lord Emsworth and his beloved pet pig the Empress; other recurring characters include Uncle Fred and a man named Psmith, all with lots of money and time on their hands.
I started my Wodehouse deep dive with several Bertie & Jeeves books and was having a fine time until I hit my fifth book at which time I realized that perhaps binging these stories was not a good idea. I'm not a binge watcher of streaming TV though I have been known to soak myself in musicians and actors and authors when I discover them. But reading a bunch of Wodehouse books in a row made me realize that, even though his humor doesn't suffer, his narratives do. The plots are all both similar and inconsequential. Bertie gets into a romantic entanglement and Jeeves gets him out of it. Bertie gets in trouble with one of his aunts and Jeeves gets him out of it. Bertie is suspected of a crime and Jeeves gets him out of it. And so on. The novels usually wind up with several situations being dealt with at the same time, and though no one could accuse Wodehouse of writing realistic stories, some of the plot points get so outlandish that I gave up caring and read just for punch lines and witticisms. That's not necessarily bad, but I slowly felt like I was reading more and enjoying it less.
For me, the high water mark was The Mating Season, which featured several recurring characters (Catsmeat, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Aunt Agatha) and one, Esmond Haddock, described as a Greek god "combination of a poet and an all-in wrestler," who I hoped to meet again. But with the next book, I realized that I was just going through the motions, reading and chuckling but not really connecting with the characters or the stories. Not only were situations being repeated, but several laugh lines were as well, and I feared I was getting to the point where I would start disliking Wodehouse so I stopped for a while.
After a few months I picked up Thank You, Jeeves and realized I should have waited a bit longer. This one has an unusual plot in that Jeeves, fed up with Bertie playing the ukulele (badly) at all hours, resigns. Of course, he still manages to help Bertie out of tight spots, and in the end, Bertie gives in and gives up the uke. But it all still felt kind of tired. I picked up another one and a third of the way in, discovered I had read it years ago—many of his books were published under alternate titles over time. Eventually I read a non-Jeeves books, a one-off called The Adventures of Sally, and was surprised (though I shouldn't have been) that it was largely a Bertie Wooster story (with a female lead) without a Jeeves. By the halfway point, I was trudging through it. I was worried that I had become permanently disillusioned with Wodehouse.
But somehow, after another few months, I found my way back to Wodehouse through a couple of Uncle Fred books (Uncle Fred in the Springtime and Cocktail Hour) and enjoyed them. There are few direct echoes of Bertie and Jeeves in these (though some jokes get repeated) so things were just different enough that I started paying attention to the story again. I read another one-off, The Old Reliable, set in Hollywood, with recognizable tropes and laugh lines, but again different enough to feel new. Interestingly, this feels like maybe the end of my Wodehouse period. There are many other volumes out there and I have read a couple of the recent pastiches, one of which, Jeeves and the King of Clubs by Ben Schott, was quite well done, recalling Wodehouse without being slavish about it. I'm thinking a couple of times a year may be enough. And there's always the Blandings TV show from 2013 with Timothy Spall and Jennifer Saunders (above) recreating Wodehouse characters almost as well as Laurie and Fry.
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