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"Tea" by Stacey D'Erasmo
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"Girl With a Pearl Earring" by Tracy Chevalier, "The Music Lesson" by Katharine Weber and "Girl in Hyacinth Blue" by Susan Vreeland
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By Ann Hodgman
[01/07/00]

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Jeeves in the Morning By P.G. Wodehouse HarperCollins Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com Life With Jeeves: The Inimitable Jeeves, Very Good, Jeeves!, and Right Ho, Jeeves By P.G. Wodehouse Viking Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com Luck of the Bodkins By P.G. Wodehouse Viking Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com Uncle Fred in the Springtime By P.G. Wodehouse Viking Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com The Girl in Blue By P.G. Wodehouse Penguin Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com Also Today Unhand that butler! Ask Jeeves and its new agent, Mike Ovitz, claim that their butler isn't Bertie Wooster's. By David McDonough

Pronounce him "Woodhouse," thank you kindly. He is a humorist without peer. In 92 books (including 11 novels and countless short stories about the inimitable valet Jeeves), not to mention musical comedies galore, his verbal pyrotechnics made me appreciate the possibilities of language long before I ever considered going to graduate school for English literature. At the core of his appeal is the Wodehousean prose style: a mixture of mangled literary references, Edwardian slang, invented slang, ludicrous formality and remarkable joie de vivre.

Here is Bertie on the subject of his friend Boko's troubled love affair:

Love's silken bonds are not broken just because the female half of the sketch takes umbrage at the loony behavior of the male partner and slips it across him in a series of impassioned speeches. However devoutly a girl may worship the man of her choice, there always comes a time when she feels an irresistible urge to haul off and let him have it in the neck. I suppose if the young lovers I've known in my time were placed end to end ... they would reach half-way down Piccadilly. And I couldn't think of a single dashed one who hadn't been through what Boko had been through to-night.

The ecstatic, cooing sort of mirth such passages invoke in me is certainly well and good. I'm all for it. But truth be told, the books are not really the point. What I really love is the newsgroup.

AFW is a mix of role-playing, hobbyism and scholarly inquiry. Whereas newsgroups devoted to canonical authors like Joyce or Kafka tend to maintain an intellectual focus, AFW recreates Blandings Castle, the setting for 10 Wodehouse novels and several short stories. Enter the online community, and you arrive at the Shropshire seat of the dotty Lord Emsworth, his faithful butler Beach and his prize-winning pig. Gone are the trials and tribulations of modern life: On AFW, we concern ourselves with acquiring the recipe for Jeeves' famous hangover cure, musing upon the meaning of "boomps-a-daisy" (something like "very well, indeed") and placing virtual bets on whether Boko Fittleworth's forthcoming infant progeny will look more like Winston Churchill -- or a squashed prune.

How do you pronounce "Featherstoneaugh"? The answer is "Fanshaw." We mire ourselves in Wodehouse trivia, along with bibliography, dramatic adaptations of various sorts and musical theater. Since I logged on to AFW, members have also conducted a pumpkin-growing contest online, polled one another to determine favorite cocktails and puddings and written a large collection of clerihews, most of questionable merit. Together, by submitting numerous nominations via the Web, we briefly managed to put "Only a Factory Girl" -- a bestseller written by the entirely fictional novelist Rosie M. Banks, who appears in several Wodehouse stories -- on Random House's controversial list of the 100 best novels ever written. It wasn't long, however, before the official chappies caught on, and Banks was replaced by Tolkien.

Each member has a "nom de Plum" (Plum was Pelham Grenville Wodehouse's nickname), and behaves accordingly -- breaking character often, but always infusing every exchange with Plum's signature verbal style. I love playing my part, immersing myself in this fictional world. It's different from the experience of reading a book, both because I become a participant in the fiction-making process rather than a passive reader, and because the fantasy is collaborative rather than experienced in isolation. We are all in it together. "What Ho!" I cry to Beach the Butler, who chose his nom because "there is a certain similarity in build: like Beach I am not fat, but far from svelte. I also have rather a fruity English accent ... And I wanted to be in Blandings, or 'heaven' as I tend to think of it." He is likely to respond with typical portly gravity that he trusts my weekend was satisfactory, Madam, and would I care for a cocktail?

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