Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse
Nell Stillman, a schoolteacher widowed after an unhappy marriage, has a son who returns from WWI shell-shocked. Events like the sinking of the Lusitania and the stock market crash intrude on the lives of her small town’s residents. Nell’s teaching job is threatened when her live-in baby sitter disappears to have her own baby. Turning to literature to console herself, she works her way through Austen, Balzac, Twain, Hardy, Henry James, George Eliot, and Trollope before finding her true love in Love Among the Chickens, one of Pelham Greenville Wodehouse’s early novels. His cheerful optimism, verbal mastery, and intricate plots leading to inevitable happy endings brighten what could be an otherwise dreary life. (I recently took the advice of the Times Literary Supplement and cured a case of the flu by taking to my bed with a Wodehouse novel.) Nell gives and receives his books as presents and follow his prolific career novel by novel, going through Blandings Castle and arriving at Bertie and Jeeves.
The subject matter and tone of this novel are completely opposite to Wodehouse’s self-described musical comedies written as novels. Literature about literature usually takes the form of sensitive young men like Stephen Dedalus or Proust’s narrator discovering themselves as novelists. Here the reader is the center. I strongly recommend this unusual novel, but if you haven’t read Wodehouse, I would suggest you start with him, perhaps with How Right You Are Jeeves.
