Review: The Man Upstairs and Other Stories

The Man Upstairs and Other Stories by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A lot of Wodehouse's early stories, including these, are written to a basic romance formula, which has several variations.

After the meet-cute, the proposal (sometimes even the marriage) usually follows rapidly, but then ensues one of several complications:

- An obstacle, almost always lack of money, often combined with family opposition, until (usually) good fortune more than the protagonists' actions resolves the situation.
- A deception, intended to win over the other person, but it backfires and makes (usually) her furious, until (usually) he finally gets a chance to explain, and all is forgiven.
- Behaving in a particular way, which causes problems in the relationship, but a change of behaviour may or may not be an improvement.

A lack of suitability of one or both of the people for human relationships in general is not always considered a barrier to happiness ('Something to Worry About' definitely has something to worry about in the young woman, who is trouble waiting to happen, and I don't envy her ill-advised lover in the least; the man in the title story also comes off as a bit of a stalker), though there is one story in which the protagonist wins wealth and then spurns his former inamorata, having seen through her grasping ways, and in another story one of the men who is a fortune-hunter gets revealed for the louse he is. In both cases, the men are French; maybe there was some British cultural reason why Wodehouse felt that French men could be left without a HEA and it would be fine.

Sometimes someone else with an interest one way or the other involves themselves in encouraging or discouraging the match, with or without success, and this becomes a source of plot tension and comedy. Often, in the interests of an expedient plot, the couple don't spend much time together before deciding to spend the rest of their lives together, but sometimes spending more time together draws people closer, and sometimes it pushes them apart.

Massive coincidence sometimes plays a role, though less so than in most of his novels of the same period. In one story, though, the hero happens to encounter a man twice by complete coincidence, confides his troubles to him, and by a third and much larger coincidence discovers that he's the one person who can help him with his problem (which his own incompetence has partly created).

The author's trying a few different things, in other words, ringing changes on a very basic romance plot. His later and better-known works often incorporate some kind of romantic complications, though many of them are what I think of as "anti-romances," where the challenge is to break off an unwanted attachment. No doubt what he learned from these early stories, where romance is the focus, helped him in the later ones where it was more of a background element.

Only one of the stories involves golf, so marking it as "Golf Stories, #0.5" is almost as misleading as calling The Man With Two Left Feet and Other Stories "Jeeves, #0.5" (though not quite, since Jeeves barely appears in that one).

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