Book Review: Quick Service

Title: Quick Service

Author: P.G. Wodehouse

Date: 1940

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: none

Length: 310 pages

Quote: “When I painted that portrait...I had a private income—the young artist’s best friend. It was later converted to his own use by the lawyer who had charge of it...I struggled along for a while, getting thinner and thinner, and finally did what I ought to have had the sense to do at the start. I saved J.B. Duff from a watery grave.”

Quick Service does not contain any of P.G. Wodehouse’s best loved characters, Jeeves and Bertie, Psmith, the Drones Club, the Blandings Castle tribe, or even Mr Mulliner. The character quoted above, however, seems to have been a final fling with the memories on which Psmith was based. He’s called Joss Weatherby and he shares Psmith’s talent for getting around people and out of messes. He’s in love with one of several different, though obviously related, cute, clever, funny, nervy young women Wodehouse called Sally.

Though Wodehouse would soon immigrate to the United States, where he’d already sold some of his comedies, and most of the main characters in this stand-alone story are Americans in England, in other ways Quick Service adheres to the same formula as the Drones Club and Blandings Castle stories. A complex family misunderstanding seems to be soluble only when some of the junior members of a family do something that could be misunderstood as a crime against one of their elders, but really it’s just a way to get everyone to explain what they really want, and they all end up feeling better about one another.

Because Jeeves and Bertie function as a couple, Bertie often expresses fear of women, and the things other characters say to each other (for comic effect) often sound ridiculously wrong, some have accused Wodehouse of writing misogynist or gynophobic fiction. I dispute that claim. The nineteenth century was a sexist period and no Edwardian like most of Wodehouse’s characters, much less a late Victorian like Wodehouse himself, was free from sexist ideas, but when he wasn’t writing about Bertie Wooster Wodehouse seems to have tried harder than most of his contemporaries to write decent parts for women. In Quick Service he succeeded. The two overbearing older women are capable and not unsympathetic; Sally is a real comic heroine; even Miss Pym, a member of the lower class, has more sense and spirit than many comic heroines of this period. Though Miss Pym is obviously meant to be played for laughs more than to highlight the serious problems an ignorant working class presented to society, she stands her ground and proves herself “right.”

I think it’s fair to describe Wodehouse as a sentimentalist at heart, though many of his comic effects relied on parodying sentimental Victorian novels. He made fun of the cliché phrases, but he liked to leave everyone nicely reconciled to everyone else and all set to live happily ever after until the public demanded a sequel. Though sometimes, as in the preposterous final scene of Quick Service, his characters’ “happily ever after” should perhaps be modified by “in their own weird little way.”

A more serious criticism of this and most Wodehouse novels was that Wodehouse tended to reuse plot twists and phrases. Each story is still funny, with different plot twists and phrases to laugh at, but afterward a reader can wonder whether, if you’ve read one Wodehouse novel, you’ve read them all. Well, not quite. In the characters’ attitudes toward marriage, for instance, Bertie always dodges the girls who want to be married so desperately they’d even consider Bertie, and retreats back into dependence on Jeeves; the young people and some of the older ones at Blandings Castle, on the other hand, often want to be married and will be by the end of the story. Bingo Little, Bertie's buddy who wanted to be married in Jeeves, stayed happily married and solved practical problems in each subsequent Drones Club story. Nevertheless Wodehouse did rely on a relatively small number of plot elements for what turned out to be a very large number of stories. While reading chapter one of Quick Service you know that Sally is going to be married, George is going to succeed in getting his money out of the control of Mr Duff (though you imagine it won’t do him much good), and Mr Duff and Mrs Chavender are going to fall in love all over again, by the end. The suspense, such as it is, lies in laughing your way through each of the comic lines and scenes that narrate how they achieve these goals.

And if you pay attention, you can probably avoid mixing up Mrs Steptoe (“a wiry little person” still married to Mr Steptoe) and Mrs Chavender (“a majestic woman in the early forties,” widowed for long enough to remember that she was once engaged to Mr Duff’), but since both of them are rich Americans who try to sound British while in Britain, you’ll not recognize them by their lines. Wodehouse wrote stage plays and movies as well as novels, and specified that these sisters-in-law were to be further distinguished by the smaller woman keeping a big dog (an Alsatian) and the bigger one keeping a small dog (a Pekinese). They’re still so much alike that, if they weren’t so often together, they might be accused of being the same person.

Recently both British and American bloggers have lamented the increasing difficulty of getting published on the other side of The Pond and the scarcity of characters from one's own country in fiction from the other country. Part of the hesitation comes from respect, but the solidarity among all the English-speaking countries that was taken for granted in fiction of the 1970s seems to have become a less popular theme recently. Wodehouse never hesitated to write about non-British characters due to respect. He spent much of his life in the US writing about the UK; he wrote stories set in both countries, with characters from both countries, and his rule for writing goodhearted comic character of any nationality was not to worry too much about credibility and just write comic characters. Wodehouse's English characters were always fascinated by US slang and his American characters' lines always sounded as if they were fascinated by British accents and vocabulary too; apart from the occasional linguistic quirk used to characterize an individual, all Wodehouse characters can be said to speak a very special dialect that might be called Wodehouse English, but they're never offensive and always funny

Mr Duff and Mr Steptoe are only a little better characterized. Both of them are self-made millionnaires who are attracted by their wives’ imitations of real British aristocrats, but who have in common with real aristocrats a lack of interest in imitating aristocrats themselves. Both are large men, running to fat. Duff is dyspeptic, presumably because he eats too much ham. Steptoe, though married to an older wife, thinks he can still play tough-guy characters and wants to go back to California and try to get another cameo role in another movie.

So where does Joss Weatherby come into this story? Though actually the central character, he makes his entrance in chapter two. More than that would be Spoilers.

Wodehouse's goal was always comedy rather than credibility, and to achieve his goal he often adapted plots from Moliere, but he could never be accused of failing to be funny.