Wodehouse at Work

by Richard Usborne

P.G. Wodehouse has been making merry in novels and short stories for nearly sixty years now, and at the age of eighty he is still - bless his irreverent but kindly heart! - producing the goods . . .extremely good goods. In Wodehouse at Work, Richard Usborne probes and analyses the works of Wodehouse and some nine or ten of his characters who have joined the immortals. Usborne confesses he much prefers reading Wodehouse books to writing about them, which may explain why he has been five years preparing this critical survey. Oh, yes, there's a lot of criticism here. That is why Usborne has carefully avoided using the word "genius." You can't easily say "Tut, tut!' to a man you've called genius to his face. Back in the 1930's Hilaire Belloc named Wodehouse as the greatest writer of English then practicing. Usborne does not quarrel with this assessment though he is sure that Wodehouse's most polished writing, in his funniest book of all, was produced after World War II, when its author was in his middle sixties. Tut, tut. Sixty is too old for a man of Wodehouse's eminence to be fooling around like a twenty-year-old. But he won't stop. He is in excellent fooling at eighty. How does he manage it? Usborne broods on this absorbing problem, and this book it is fascinating to see what he makes of it.

Hardcover