What On Earth Is a "Freak" Dinner?!

The Coming of Bill by P.G. Wodehouse

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars
Wodehouse apparently dabbled in domestic romance in the early days. You can almost see him wrestling with his sense of humor in this, trying to keep it straight. The ubiquitous prize fighter is there, the foolish rich folk and the fearsome middle-aged female are all there. The typical Wodehouse way of describing a baby (beautiful to the parents but generally giving the appearance of a boiled egg to others) is there. He's found the elements of his voice, but hasn't polished him the way he does later. I read once that Wodehouse would type up his stories and tape them up on the wall around his office. When he wasn't typing, he'd walk from one page to another trying to find a way to improve on what he'd written. When the pages were perfect, they came down. I mean, does any writer bother with that now? They probably figure that's what editors are for.

I wondered, of course, why I'm bothering to read something that just isn't funny (although the humor cracks through here and there) and then I started looking on this as a period piece and, finally, as a satire of our own times. Here is a story of how money ruins happiness. We get stories like this all the time, we have maxims like "Money doesn't buy happiness" but in this story, too much money actually kills happiness. Ruth and Kirk are happy in their relationship and with their (plainly average) child until a windfall inheritance changes Ruth back into the socialite. Kirk is forced to endure dinner parties with boring people whose only distinguishing feature is the amount of money they are worth. Ruth's sister-in-law gets caught up in the fever of wealth and splurges beyond her husband's capacity to keep up on "freak" dinners and baubles. No one is content with "just enough."

This reminds me of the $2,000 shower curtain mentality of today's (well, back a bit farther than today) nouveau riche. "Just enough" is just plainly not enough.

And that's where people get into trouble. Fortunately, we have lovely fiction stories to show us the way, eh? Riiiiight. One wonders if Wodehouse was seeing this in his day, if he had friends or acquaintances whose lives were blighted by too much of the ready too fast. At some point, the grievous rift between Kirk and Ruth seemed so real (despite the grotesque exaggerations) and so deftly described, that it seemed Wodehouse had personal knowledge of this as well.

Still, I'm glad he learned to polish each page until they gleamed with a laugh or a delightful turn-of-phrase.


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