Joy in the Morning by P. G. Wodehouse

“It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.”

In the past 3 years, I have read aloud what I believe to be every Wodehouse story, novella, and novel about Bertram Wooster and his butler, Jeeves. When I read Right Ho, Jeeves back in 2010, I didn't expect to read another; but while sitting in the car waiting for something, there was a Jeeves book in the glove-box. I read a couple pages, decided to read Liz a funny part, had to start on page one for context and here we are.

The corpus consists of 11 novels and 35 short stories, though there is some contention about whether some of the early stories, starring a guy named Reggie instead of Wooster, should be counted in that number as most of those stories were rewritten later for Bertram. But I digress.

For the completely unfamiliar, the stories follow Bertram Wooster, an upper class twit, good-hearted but "oofy", and his wise beyond all reason valet, Jeeves. All but one, Ring for Jeeves, are narrated by Wooster, and all involve a series of misunderstandings, usually brought about or at least exacerbated by societal expectations. All eventually seems lost, until we learn in the end that Jeeves has been working behind the scenes and that all is well.

When Chris, on my recommendation, read Code of the Woosters, he had this to say:

I liked The Code of the Woosters. I didn't exactly develop a lifelong addiction, like some people do; in fact, I probably won't read another one of these. I expect, rightly or wrongly, that they mostly all go the same way.

And he is, more or less, correct. Indeed, some of the plot points recur in almost every book--Bertie accidentally becomes engaged to a woman he doesn't want to marry, often on a rebound from one of his many friends; Bertie is coerced into carrying out some unpleasant social business for his aunt; Jeeves reads Spinoza, a philosopher well-suited for a man who seems to run the world as an extension of himself; Bertie has an article of clothing/piece of art Jeeves hates (and will eventually dispose of). There are even two separate books that revolve around Bertie's theft of the same cow-shaped creamer ladle!

And yet, the books are compulsively readable and often very funny, largely due to Wodehouse's absolute mastery of Bertie's voice, with which he never produces an anodyne sentence. Reading one for the first time, one is struck by the preponderance of lingo, most of which seems to have never really existed outside of Wodehouse's novels.  For example:

You know, the way love can change a fellow is really frightful to contemplate. This chappie before me, who spoke in that absolutely careless way of macaroons and limado, was the man I had seen in happier days telling the head-waiter at Claridge’s exactly how he wanted the chef to prepare the sole frite au gourmet aux champignons, and saying he would jolly well sling it back if it wasn’t just right. Ghastly! Ghastly!

Further, there is, if not exactly character development--Bertie never, thankfully, outgrows his dependence on Jeeves--growth. Early on, Bertie feels cowed asking Jeeves for help, and often goes his own way, returning only when the straits are dire; later on, Jeeves is always stop number one. Bertie is forever searching for words, which Jeeves provides, and attempting to quote poetry, which ditto, and as the novels progress, Bertie incorporates these words and lines into his narration. Little things, satisfying nods to the continuity of the Jeeves/Wooster relationship.

The books are fundamentally about relationships, to each other and to society. Upper-class British society and its often confounding mores are the machine that drives the plot, and Wooster's stable of friends both male--Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Stilton Cheeseright--and female--Rosie M. Banks, Madeline Bassett, Stiffy Byng--provide the old oil. In spite of being the best known in popular culture, Jeeves himself is largely a foil for Wooster, disappearing for large chunks of the narrative to allow the plot to thicken, springing into reader-visible action only in the last act. There's rarely any explicit criticism of the class differences inherent in the Wooster-Jeeves relationship, though one can certainly intuit from the large cast of incompetent trust-fund adults that the serving class, of whom Jeeves is representative, is what really keeps society from collapsing.

And here we are at the end and I've said nothing about Joy in the Morning specifically, and there's a reason for that. The plot is more-or-less what I've outlined above, though it's one of the better books (Code of the Woosters may be the best), and I probably won't review the rest of the Jeeves books indiviudually. I like these books and find them comforting, fun, and funny. And I guess that's it.