Category: comic writing

JOY IN THE MORNING by PG Wodehouse


I’ve been meaning to read some Wodehouse for ages, and this was it: JOY IN THE MORNING.

It is the fourth of Wodehouse’s eleven wildly popular Jeeves and Wooster stories. Bertie Wooster is a dim but wealthy gentleman living in London in the 1930s. Jeeves is his butler, who is very much the brains of the operation, and is constantly having to get Wooster out of what I can only describe as – this being a nineteen thirties comic novel – scrapes. In JOY IN THE MORNING, Bertie has to go down to Steeple Bumpleigh, the home of his terrifying aunt, to help his friend secure the hand of the girl he loves. There’s all sorts of hijinks (I use the word advisedly), involving explosions, fancy dress balls, boy scouts and drunken uncles, and eventually Jeeves saves the day.

In general, I love these establishment English Lit figures. This is no doubt because I have been so colonized mentally, and Bob Marley would be ashamed of me. Thus, I expected to love Wodehouse. I’m really sorry to say that this is not the case. It all seemed horribly overwritten – every sentence was crammed to the brim with ironic, slangy language; and the comic idea (idiot rich man, clever servant) seemed rather old hat. It might only seem old hat now of course, because Wodehouse was the milliner who first made this particular hat, and now we’ve seen it repeated over and over.

So perhaps while it does appear derivative, it is only derivative of itself. Whatever. I was bored.

As a side point, JOY IN THE MORNING alludes to Psalm 30:5: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” Which I think is rather lovely. And interesingly, the title has actually been used for two other novels. You must just read the write-up for the 1950s one below, especially if you want to barf:

“In Brooklyn, New York, in 1927, Carl Brown and Annie McGairy meet and fall in love. Though only eighteen, Annie travels alone to the Midwestern university where Carl is studying law to marry him. Little did they know how difficult their first year of marriage would be, in a faraway place with little money and few friends. But Carl and Annie come to realize that the struggles and uncertainty of poverty and hardship can be overcome by the strength of a loving, loyal relationship. An unsentimental yet uplifting story, Joy in the Morning is a timeless and radiant novel of marriage and young love.”

Barf.

Book: WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED Contd

So yes, basically, I find it encouraging that David Sedaris wasted that much of his life and still seems to have got somewhere. Not that I’m some big druggie, but I’ve certainly wasted my fair share of time here and there.

I find Sedaris’ use of language strangely brilliant. I’ll laugh out loud at a sentence, and then spend ages trying to understand what about that turn of phrase made it so funny. It’s less about the comedy of incident,and more about the comedy of language, which is SO DIFFICULT. So well done that man.

He does on occasion try, especially at the ends of his stories, to give us a kind of literary thrill, or a sense that he’s been talking about something larger than we at first thought. This is only sometimes successful.

Disclaimer: Okay, I skipped some stories this time round. I really didn’t feel I could handle the death ones. Maybe when I know you better I’ll tell you why.

Book: WHEN YOU ARE IN ENGULFED IN FLAMES by David Sedaris


Now, this is another kind of unusual book for me, because:

a)it was left at my house randomly, I didn’t choose it
b)for some reason, it is in large print. Which is odd, as the person who left it at my house has normal eyesight
c)this is a re-reading. And I almost never re-read

I re-read it because I hadn’t got to the Library and I was feeling a bit blah and I happened to see it and it looked cheering. It looks more sort of mangled, now, as it fell into the bath several times during this reading. Oh dear.

WHEN YOU ARE IN ENGULFED IN FLAMES is a series of comic short stories. The longest one is very long, and is about his attempt to give up smoking by moving to Tokoyo. David Sedaris actually really reminds me of Proust. Now, don’t be hating, and thinking I’m pretentious. I totally get to say that because a) it’s true and b) I’ve actually read IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, which, let’s face it all you Tolstoy loving bunch of bitches, is probably the best novel ever written. And I’m just saying ‘probably’ so as not to appear too dogmatic.

But please, let’s not even deny it’s the best novel of the twentieth century, because that’s just blatantly true, whether you like it or not (all you James Joyce loving bitches out there).

What I find similar in them is the kind of unassuming honesty they possess. It’s a book that makes you feel like you are less alone in the world; that other people are experiencing the day-to-day as you are. JANE EYRE is a fabulous novel, but it doesn’t deal at all with 95% percent of our lives – the pedestrian part.

The character that is David Sedaris in these stories is sort of sweetly imperfect. It’s interesting also that he seems to have blown large sections of his life on being kind of drugged up. I sometimes feel that . . . oh no, go to go. More on this tomorrow.