The last of Bertie

Bertie Wooster's life is beset with the usual challenges in Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (1974): an aunt, of course; young lovers with obstacles on their path to matrimony, and gruff older men, who usually provide those obstacles. But this time there's a newcomer to the plot, a cat.

Published when P.G. Wodehouse was in his 90s, just a year or so before his death, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen is more reflective of the time in which it was written than most Jeeves and Wooster novels. There's a reference to Billy Graham, for example, even if the Billy Graham of the novel is a poacher, and there's a passage about leftists throwing bottles at police officers that reads like it could have been written yesterday. But demonstrations, sometimes turning violent, were also commonplace in the early 1970s.

When Bertie finds his body covered with spots, his doctor suggests rest in the country, and his Aunt Dahlia offers him a village cottage that seems ideal, especially because Jeeves happens to have an aunt living in the same village. This aunt takes Jeeves away for most of the story, leaving Bertie on his own, which always means trouble.

Bertie's aunt has a ulterior motive for her invitation to her nephew. She wants him to hide a stolen cat.   The cat pacifies a certain horse about to race against another horse on which Aunt Dahlia has placed a great deal of money. Bertie, showing a stronger sense of ethics than usual in these tales, objects and hires Billy Graham to stealthily return the cat. The cat, however, likes Bertie and keeps coming back.

Meanwhile Vanessa, the daughter of the man with the horse and the cat, happens to be the bottle thrower. She is also a young beauty who once rejected Bertie's marriage proposal, to his great relief after he came to his senses. Now, after a fight with her boyfriend, she tells Bertie she will marry him after all, and she begins immediately to start reforming him, reminding him of why it was such a great relief when she previously turned him down. So Bertie is stuck with both a cat and a fiancee he doesn't want. Where is Jeeves when he needs him?

Wodehouse may have been a very old man when he wrote this novel, but it shows no sign of a decline in his ability. In fact, this is better than the earliest Jeeves and Wooster stories. It's pure delight from beginning to end.

How to hire a lexicographer

John Simpson

Does any university anywhere offer a major in lexicography? I doubt it. Not even Oxford University, home of the Oxford English Dictionary, does that. There simply are not enough dictionaries being produced at any one time to warrant studying lexicography on the chance of landing one of those few jobs. So then where do lexicographers, the people who compile dictionaries, come from?

The most interesting chapter in John Simpson's memoir, The Word Detective, reviewed here a few days ago, may be the one in which he discusses how he made hiring decisions when he headed the OED. His methods sound outrageous, yet they apparently worked.

For example, he favored left-handers over right-handers. He turned away applicants who said they "love words." "What is the point of loving words and at the same time expecting to analyze and classify them?" he asks. He also frowned on applicants who used the word hone during interviews.

One hiring strategy that makes more obvious sense is to choose listeners, not talkers. Unless you are looking for someone in sales or politics or a very few other kinds of positions, listeners are usually better employment choices than talkers. That's because talkers talk more than they work. Their talk disturbs other workers. Talkers don't like working alone, something lexicography certainly requires. As for listeners, Simpson wanted employees who heard language and observed how words were used in everyday conversation. Many talkers only listen to themselves.

Simpson hired finishers, not ramblers. By that he means he wanted people who weren't interested in research for research's sake. Instead he wanted those who could quickly complete the research on each word, then move on to the next one.

He imagines various famous people from the past coming into his office to apply for an opening. Dickens, he says, "would have been exasperatingly fond of lengthy, indulgent, and detailed descriptions." Archimedes was more a numbers man than a letters man. Agatha Christie, being interested in detection, shows promise. But was she left-handed?

Detecting words

There are a few of us for whom a memoir by a lexicographer sounds like fascinating stuff, and for us few John Simpson's The Word Detective (2016) is a winner.

Hired in the 1970s by the Oxford English Dictionary, after first being turned away, Simpson found a career as a "word detective" a perfect fit for him. He gradually rose through the ranks until he became its chief editor, overseeing the transformation of the OED from a giant, multi-volume reference found mostly in libraries to a valuable online resource available on anyone's phone or computer.

The phrase "word detective" seems apt, for the work of a lexicographer involves such tasks as discovering the many meanings of a particular word at various points in the expanding English-speaking world, accounting for different spellings and pronunciations and, perhaps most difficult of all, determining the earliest use of this word. "At the time," Simpson writes, "I couldn't imagine anything that was as much fun as doing this: working fast, assimilating insightful but sometimes mistimed comments, taking a good entry and making it as perfect as possible."

Throughout his book Simpson uses such words as crowdsourcing and transpired, then in an aside explains something about that particular word's history and meaning, thus not just telling us how he worked but showing us the actual results of word detecting.

Sometimes Simpson gets personal, never more so than when he writes about Ellie, his now adult daughter who can neither speak nor understand language. It's a tragic irony — the man in charge of the world's greatest English dictionary having a wordless daughter with whom he cannot communicate.

More than a memoir, The Word Detective is also a modern history of the OED, with a lot of its early history thrown in. Simpson is now retired yet, through his memoir, still serving the old firm well.

Lincoln's love triangle

A love triangle involving Abraham Lincoln? Well, yes, and what's more, Louis Bayard's 2019 novel Courting Mr. Lincoln sticks fairly close to the historical record.

Lincoln and Mary Todd show up in Springfield, Ill., at about the same time. Gangly and ignorant of how to dress and behave in polite society, Lincoln comes to town to launch both his legal and his political careers. Mary moves in with her sister to try to find a suitable husband, although her outspokenness has so far turned suitors away.

Unable to afford a room of his own, Lincoln accepts an offer to share a bed with Joshua Speed, a merchant with good prospects and a man seen as Mary's best prospect. Yet Joshua and Mary, it turns out, are each more interested in Lincoln than in each other.

An older woman in Springfield who views herself as both a political kingmaker and a matchmaker, sees potential in Lincoln that is still invisible to others, but she knows he needs a wife to get very far in politics. She settles on Mary Todd as the best choice, and she conspires to bring the two of them together in secret in her home.

Wondering where his friend is spending his afternoons, a jealous Speed has Lincoln followed, then he reveals the secret to Mary's sister, believing that will end the affair. And it does, but only temporarily. How Abraham and Mary eventually get back together and what happens in the Lincoln-Speed friendship occupies the rest of this engrossing and very unusual romantic novel.

So did Lincoln have homosexual leanings? Bayard raises the possibility, but leaves the question unanswered. just as history does.

Someone else's movie

Larry Watson's new book The Lives of Edie Pritchard is a novel about identity. Who are we exactly, and are we always the same person? Consider these lines uttered by the title character during the story:

"I'd like to take another shot at being me."

"They'd seen what they projected on me. And now when I look at myself I wonder if that's what I'm doing too — just seeing someone else's movie."

"But the thing is, when you're back home, you never have a chance to be someone other than who you were then. Even if you never were that person."

Watson shows us three episodes from Edie's life at 20-year intervals. In the first she's Edie Linderman, a young woman married to Dean, an uncommunicative man who is jealous, and rightfully so, of Roy, his womanizing twin brother. Roy pleads with Edie to run away with him.

Then she's Edie Dunn, divorced and remarried to Gary and the mother of a teenage girl. More because of her unhappiness with Gary than any lingering love for Dean, she takes her daughter and goes to see Dean when she learns he is dying of cancer, her angry husband in pursuit. Roy is married now, but again he asks Edie to run away with him.

Finally she is Edie Pritchard again after returning to her maiden name and to her hometown, Gladstone, Mont. Her teenage granddaughter visits with two young men, her boyfriend and his brother, and Edie senses they are both trouble. Later the granddaughter calls her from Bismarck asking to be rescued.  Roy Linderman shows up to help. After they complete the rescue mission in exciting fashion, he still wants Edie to run away with him.

One thing you can say about Roy is that he, at least, is one constant in her life. Yet to Edie he is representative of her identity problem, that of "seeing someone else's movie." Even at 62, she is an unusually attractive woman, something virtually everyone in the novel, women as well as men, comment upon. Even Watson himself seems to want to define Edie by her looks. We don't learn all that much about her true identity, at least not until that final showdown with the young brothers.

In love with Cleveland

We'll Always Have Cleveland, the 2006 memoir by mystery author Les Roberts, is a book with limited appeal, which is why it came and went very quickly while making little splash. But for anyone with an interest in Cleveland or the Milan Jacovich mysteries written by Roberts, this slim volume is a must read. If you fit into both categories, it's a gold mine.

Roberts doesn't ignore Cleveland's problems — he devotes an entire chapter to them — yet mostly this is an ode to Cleveland, expressed with all the enthusiasm of a new convert. Raised in Chicago, he  spent most of his early career in Los Angeles. He was briefly an actor, then moved into writing for television (The Andy Griffith Show, The Lucy Show, etc.) and producing such shows as Hollywood Squares. Then he began writing murder mysteries set in L.A. featuring a hero named Saxon.

He discovered Cleveland in the 1980s when he went there to produce the Ohio Lottery television show. It was apparently love at first sight. It was a city with the midwestern values and weather that were familiar to him from his Chicago youth. He also saw it as an ideal place to set a new series of mystery novels.

He began the Milan Jacovich novels while still living in California, but he moved to the Cleveland area in 1990 and has never regretted the move. His book celebrates the people, sports teams, restaurants, bars, bookstores, etc., not just in Cleveland but within an hour's drive of Cleveland. His comments on Holmes County Amish country will make anyone want to spend a day there.

Roberts says his Slovenian private investigator was named after an actual dentist in Parma. The names, appearances and personalities of many people he has known in Cleveland show up in his novels, even if in slightly disguised form, and much of the action takes place in actual places in the area, often in businesses Roberts himself frequents. Clevelanders often ask to have characters, even villains, given their names.

Wherever he goes, Roberts says, he takes with him both a notebook and a tape recorder. His impressions of people and places usually show up eventually in his novels. He says he never creates a character who isn't based in some way on a real person.

The memoir is instructive about how a mystery writer works, as well as an excellent travel guide to northeastern Ohio. Unfortunately the book is a bit dated, for many of the businesses Roberts raves about are now closed for good.

Another world

A story creates its own world, often — though not always — with clear or mysterious correspondences to our own.

Francine Prose, What to Read and Why

Isaac Asimov

When reading J.R.R. Tolkien, Isaac Asimov or Lewis Carroll, readers know very quickly that they are entering a world very different from their own. Hobbits? Robots that look and act like humans? Tweedledum and Tweedledee? This is not the world we live in, which is a big part of the appeal of these writers' work.

But Francine Prose is not just talking about the likes of Tolkien, Asimov and Carroll. She is also talking about the likes of Steinbeck, Dickens, Austen, Baldacci or any other writer of fiction you might name. Every storyteller creates not just characters and a plot but a whole new world. Some fictional worlds are just more similar than others to the world you happen to live in.

In fictional worlds telemarketers rarely call. Characters rarely spend hours each day watching television. The routine labors that fill most of an average person's day rate hardly a mention. Interactions involve only a relatively small group of individuals. Characters spend little time eating and sleeping and rarely visit the bathroom. All these facts make fiction less like the real world, but also much more interesting.

In one of the essays in her book, Prose writes about Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, a six-volume, 3,500-page account that details virtually every moment of the author's life. More volumes are expected for as long as Knausgaard lives his life and writes about it. And Prose loves it.

Most of us, however, would find the very thought of reading about a stranger's life in such exacting detail to be tedious. Even our own lives aren't that interesting. When we read, give us a world that is different from our own.