I wanted to try P.G. Wodehouse because references to him started cropping up around me and also there's a set of really cool hardcover editions in my local book store (Book Soup). What I surmised is that he wrote the kind of novel that might have been made into one of those witty romantic comedies from the forties that I love. Also he's well known for a series involving a butler named Jeeves.

I downloaded something like "The Novels of P.G. Wodehouse" on my kindle but through some fluke the free sample lasted one full novel and that novel was the Adventures of Sally. Sally has nothing to do with Jeeves, but she ended up making me a confirmed fan of Wodehouse.

He's light and I think all his work is probably similar in that it can be described as comic. Also, after I finished this I found an edition of collected selections of P.G. Wodehouse which was edited by Ogden Nash, one of my favorite humorous poets. Nash's introduction reads "P.G. Wodehouse needs no introduction." Why didn't I live when I could have a conversation with these characters? Or just sit around a coffeeshop while they talked to each other? Next time someone asks me which person, living or dead I would invite to dinner, it's a toss-up between P.G. and Ogden - and maybe Truman Capote because you just KNOW he had dirt that he hadn't even begun to dish...but I digress.

Wodehouse's humor, like Jane Austen's, rests in the characters he creates and his wry observations about the society that contains and supports their unique absurdity. These flawed human beings then exhibit a natural tendency to create misery for themselves, at which point Wodehouse steps in and sets them back to rights again.

It's as though Edith Wharton came back to life in a cheerful reincarnation and wanted all her characters to have a good laugh and get on with life instead of letting their miserable lives illustrate the tragic weakness of human beings and the cruelty of cliques. Except of course Wodehouse doesn't describe his characters in nearly the loving detail that Wharton lavishes on hers. It's really easy to see how they could be adapted to screenplays, though.

Because I am the kind of person who likes romance, comedy and especially the kind that contains clever observations on human nature, I'm hooked. I'm happy that Wodehouse has so many novels for me to discover and he is definitely a new favorite.

SIDE NOTE: all my reading this month has linked itself to each other...in That Old Cape Magic the father character sneaks off from the University where he is an English professor to read Wodehouse on the beach at the Cape unmolested by snobbery...