Review: The Little Nugget

The Little Nugget by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I thought I'd read this before - I vaguely remember a hard-copy version kicking around somewhere, years ago - but I didn't remember it when I got into the text, so maybe not.

Another early Wodehouse, and one of the better ones, for my money. The use of blatant coincidence to get a small cast connected in multiple ways and into the same place at the same time is still there, but it's somehow not quite as obtrusive as in some of the other early books. The narrator of most of the book is less of a prize ass than most of Wodehouse's narrators; he makes stupid errors, yes, but he's well aware of how stupid they are, and learns from them. He's brave and resourceful and loyal, and has a backstory in which he's changed because of a painful event, and he experiences some more character growth in the course of the story. Nor is he the only character to do so.

There's a strong romance thread to the plot, complicated in good ways by believable character motivations. There's action, as is frequently the case in early Wodehouse, with gangsters and guns. (Wodehouse makes an error here, describing a Browning automatic several times as a "revolver".) There are several memorable characters, including Ogden, the objectionable 14-year-old of the title, who is a magnet for kidnappers because of his father's wealth. (He recurs in another early novel, Picadilly Jim , in which he finally gets the comeuppance he so richly deserves for being a complete little sod.)

The hero is deputized by his manipulative fiancée to kidnap this boy on behalf of his mother, who is the fiancée's friend (the fiancée also has a financial motive which she doesn't disclose to him); the boy's parents are separated, and his father has custody, because his mother is a fool about him and spoils him abominably. The hero therefore takes on the role of an assistant master at the school where Ogden is enrolled. While there, he meets someone important from his past, and encounters several professional kidnappers who are after Ogden: the aptly-nicknamed Smooth Sam Fisher and his hard-boiled competitor.

An oddity of these early Wodehouse books - which were published, often with different titles, on both sides of the Atlantic - is that they pretend that an educated English accent and an educated American accent are indistinguishable by ear. At least, nobody ever seems to figure out that an educated character is American just from hearing them speak.

While they're not as farcical and constantly comedic as his later and better-known work, I find these early works make up for that by including more interiority and character development, more developed romances, and more action and suspense. I could almost wish that Wodehouse had continued to develop these aspects of his craft, though the farces are hilarious and perfect of their kind. While this one has his usual effortless prose, it doesn't offer quite as much in the way of language play and fun as others of his books; the voice of the narrator is more serious and less foolish. I didn't feel the comedy was lacking, and enjoyed the other aspects, but others will have a different view of the balance.

This makes my annual Best of the Year list, though in the lowest tier; the author still had plenty of development of his craft ahead of him, but I did enjoy it, and I recommend it to other Wodehouse fans.

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