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New books on P.G. Wodehouse, progressive politics, and more.

Jun 13, 2005, Vol. 10, No. 37
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Books in Brief

P. G. Wodehouse by Joseph Connolly (Haus, 150 pp., $15.95) In the acknowledgments of his mini biography of P. G. Wodehouse, Joseph Connolly complains that the Wodehouse estate refused him permission to quote any of The Master's words. This would appear to be a serious stumbling block for a biographer whose subject poured all of his genius directly into his writing.

What was so great about the writing is, however, a little hard to formulate. Wodehouse's books did not succeed on the strength of a writing style as usually understood. The masterly manipulation of the language that makes, for example, Nabokov's prose so richly poetic was not Wodehouse's thing. And though he seems to be the type of writer who should have produced one-liners by the thousand, because he did write so many funny lines, his style was not very aphoristic. Rereading some of his most famous books turns up precious few examples of great stand-alones. The choice of individual words and the inflections within sentences were often ingenious, but the greatness seems to have lain in the writing's overall tone and, to use a term borrowed from the textbook industry, ease of reading. Once beguiled into a Wodehouse story, the reader zips through it effortlessly.

Since I, unlike Connolly, enjoy the right to a little quotation, why not let 'er rip? It being still spring, I'll cite a short opening passage from one of Wodehouse's relatively under-celebrated golf stories to illustrate the clear-as-a-songbird tone.

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