Books: Back at the Old Stand

JOY IN THE MORNING (281 pp.)—P. G. Wodehouse—Doubleday ($2).

In his new novel—in which the inimitable Jeeves makes his umpteenth appearance—Pelham Grenville Wodehouse says of Jeeves’s cuckoo-pated employer, Berty Wooster: “If there is one quality that distinguishes him, it is his ability to keep the lip stiff and upper and make the best of things. Though crushed to earth, as the expression is, he rises again—not absolutely in midseason form, perhaps, but perkier than you would expect and with an eye alert for silver linings.”

Readers may well feel that what’s sauce for Bertram is sauce for P. G. Joy in the Morning is not only Author Wodehouse’s 56th novel. It is also his first peacetime production since his somewhat woolly activities as a broadcaster from Nazi Germany brought down a hail of criticism on his clownish head.

In his comeback, Author Wodehouse (now living in Paris) is not absolutely in midseason form, but perky as ever. Joy in the Morning is a chatty potboiler in the tradition of most Wodehouse works. Its setting is the familiar English hamlet of Steeple Bumpleigh; its characters include such Wodehouse fixtures as crocodile-toothed Lord Worplesdon (“he had got that way through presiding at board meetings”), twelve-year-old Hon. Edwin Worplesdon (a Boy Scout “who makes you feel that what this country wants is somebody like King Herod”), “Boko” Fittleworth (“a cross between a comedy juggler and a parrot that has been dragged through a hedge backwards”), G. D’Arcy (“Stilton”) Cheesewright (“a bloke of furtive aspect”), and Lady Florence Craye (“one of those intellectual girls . . . who are unable to see a male soul without wanting to get behind it and shove”). The plot is an intricate counterpoint of love-at-first-sight, financial skullduggery in shipping circles, and Berty’s appearance at a ball, disguised as Sindbad the Sailor.

Joy in the Morning has enough to satisfy the hard core of Wodehouse readers (the average, annual P. G. W. novel sells 10,000 copies in the U.S.). But it has only a trace of real mirth for those who believe that in spasmodic moments of his heyday, Wodehouse was one of Britain’s most talented comic writers.