Review: The Small Bachelor

The Small Bachelor by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An obscure, relatively early Wodehouse, obscure mostly, I suspect, because it's a stand-alone rather than being in one of the beloved series. It has a New York setting and only a couple of British characters (a bland young lord and a supercilious and misanthropic butler), but it is very much in the Wodehouse style of farcical comedy sprinkled with bons mots. Here, the humour has a bit of a satirical bite, though it never becomes dark or cruel. Among the targets for satire are New York bohemians, New York millionaires, a society hostess, and a prolific author of self-improvement pamphlets. The latter is a significant character, and reminded me of modern inspirational influencers (some things haven't changed as much in a hundred years as we think).

The main protagonist and title character, George Finch, is one of Wodehouse's sympathetic underdogs. Having inherited enough money that he doesn't have to work, he has decided to be an artist, something he's terrible at; he's also extremely shy. While this doesn't hinder him as much as you might think in wooing his beloved, it does mean that his formidable prospective mother-in-law (one of Wodehouse's tyrannical middle-aged upper-crust women, along the lines of Bertie Wooster's Aunt Agatha) dominates him almost completely - but not to the extent that the romance can't proceed, because while he is a rabbit he isn't so much of a rabbit as to give up on love. His mentally negligible and financially embarrassed prospective father-in-law is a cypher in his own home, dependent on his wife's money, and there's a secondary plot involving him, a couple of McGuffins (a string of pearls and some share certificates), and a pickpocket whose fiancé, George's manservant, is trying to convince her to join him in going straight.

There are multiple coincidental connections among the cast, as often occurs in Wodehouse. George and the self-improvement author are neighbours and friends; the self-improvement author is a long-time friend of the family of George's beloved, and ends up falling for someone who has a connection to George. The same policeman keeps turning up in multiple connections, and so forth. It was probably his musical-comedy background that inspired Wodehouse to write these small, tightly-connected casts, which can sometimes make New York or London feel like a village; I think he pulls it off better in this book than in some of the earlier ones.

A lot of the elements are familiar, like the pawned jewels (used in at least two other books that I can think of offhand, and I'm probably forgetting some), but the overall mix still felt fresh to me, and there are some wonderful comic moments both in the action and in the narration. Unlike other books of the time, you won't find extreme casual racism or sexism plastered everywhere; while there are only a couple of Wodehouse books ( Jill the Reckless and The Adventures of Sally ) that feature women as protagonists, women usually aren't passive nobodies either, except in a few very early books. And Wodehouse's humour is gentle even while it's hilarious, and he shows respect for the ordinary poor mutt struggling to get on. His heroes have flaws, but they're not moral flaws, and that's why I enjoy them so much.

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