Jeeves and Wooster - has it aged well?

[Mushroomwithaview]

My 12 yr old wonders if she might enjoy reading PG Wodehouse. She's heard about Jeeves and Wooster. I'm happy to buy her a book, but it's been years since I read any of them, and I wonder how they've aged.

Any good for a 12 yr old? And if yes, which one?

I loved them. Can’t off hand recommend a singular one, my memory is not great of them, but I think you can get a set?
I read them in the 90s and they were fine then.

The short stories, Very Good Jeeves or Carry On Jeeves. The former was better but the latter comes first chronologically.
They have aged pretty well. Not much to shock the new generation.

The Inimitable Jeeves has Jeeves being hired and introduces some recurring characters, but Carry On Jeeves is a more common starting point.

The audio books are an excellent introduction for younger readers, I’ve found, as the tone can be a little challenging at first to readers unfamiliar with the language and style - it is around 100 years ago since Jeeves first appeared.

After an audio book, jump in to the novels as much as she likes. They are still very funny and daft in the most charming way.

Theres one story involving minstrels with blacked up faces. They are very much of their time with regards to women. But I enjoyed reading them at that age though as a lot of fun.

My favourite was the Blandings series.

I think they’ve aged extremely well, almost every man in them is a total idiot.. which seems to be the modern vibe.

They reflect the upper class attitudes of the day toward women, minorities and class but they are also extremely funny and well written.

As someone who fitted into all three categories I never worried about my kids reading good books from this era - rather that than some of the faux history where this is airbrushed out. It made for some interesting discussions about the extent of real change over the years and how so many attitudes persist but are skirted over with "nicer" language.

I preferred Blandings too. And especially Uncle Fred.

@EmpressaurusOfCats

The best ever is Uncle Fred when he is at Blandings!

In general, comedy ages badly. Shakespeare, for example, is painfully unfunny, and so are many of the old stand ups and sitcoms. Wodehouse, however, is still genuinely and deeply funny. And the humour is so wonderfully warm and kind and all-embracing. There really is nothing like it. I think it's harder to be funny than to be witty (Oscar Wilde is witty, but Wodehouse is funny). However, it's even harder to be funny without being nasty or crude. Wodehouse pulls it off effortlessly. Reading him is like "swimming in champagne," as someone said.

I just don't know how to over-praise him. Marian Keyes said that Wodehouse created a world, and it's so true. Very few writers have managed that (I suppose Dickens and Jane Austen would be the exceptions). It's a world without evil and cruelty and death, though. Douglas Adams said Wodehouse managed what Milton could not – he re-created paradise.

But the humour is wrapped up in the language. You can't disentangle them. He creates his beautiful, sunlit world out of language. Take away his spellbinding language, and you're left with a load of selfish rich people behaving idiotically. If you don't love language, you won't love Wodehouse. It's as simple as that. Frankly, I don't even think of him as a novelist. He didn't write prose. He wrote beautiful prose poetry. If you want your son to cultivate a love of language, he's your man.

He's best read out loud, however. Wodehouse was just made for audiobook (so was Evelyn Waugh). Stephen Fry reads him superbly. I constantly read him out loud. (Though I say so myself, I do a pretty good Jeeves.) He's better than Prozac.

That’s a spiffing summary and I am tempted to get them for my kindle and reread now!

As Bertie says "one does not court praise. The adulation of the multitude mean very little to one."😉

Even typing his words sends a shiver down my spine. When he died, critics compared him to Shakespeare and Keats, and they weren't joking. He was a poet. For style, I'll take him over Nabokov, Joyce and Woolf.

At one point, for example, he describes his uncle as looking like "a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow." To describe someone as looking like a miserable pterodactyl would be pretty good. But a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow. That's genius. It's the word 'secret' that dazzles me – and the alliteration. Sheer poetry. No other writer would come up with that.

Another magnificent passage is when Anatole, the French chef, throws a tantrum and starts cursing in English. But because he's spent most of his career working for New York gangsters and English aristocrats, his English is a weird mash up of accents and slang. What comes out is stunning. I honestly think Wodehouse is the greatest writer England produced in the 20th century. I know the critics would go for Woolf or D H Lawrence, but Wodehouse is unique. I could imagine the USA or Australia producing a writer like Lawrence. And I could imagine a country like France producing Woolf. But no other nation could have produced Wodehouse.

When my son was a teenager he read all of them. He's 25 now. He read them off his own bat and loved them.

I think they are very funny and do still stand up.

What I love about Wodehouse is, despite reading and re-reading, I almost always find some beautiful phrase or joke which I previously missed. Such a talent.

Wodehouse is the only writer that reliably makes me LOL. I never agree with @Harriet766 but I agree with her about Wodehouse's genius, his writing is joyous.

I have been reading Wodehouse again recently!
I remember my joy at discovering him when his books were recommended by a librarian on the mobile library to a shy, book loving girl over 50 years ago.
I could not believe how wonderful they were.
I have a reread about every 2 years or so, though I do love to listen on Audible or BorrowBox.

When it comes to laughing out loud, long ago Lilian Beckwith had that effect, now it's Terry Pratchett and, yes, Jeeves and Wooster!

I hope your son loves them too!

I think USA came pretty close with Damon Runyon. Similar in many ways, short story format, recurrent characters, language based comedy. Set amongst gangsters in prohibition era USA and the inspiration for "Guys and Dolls"

I started with The Inimitable Jeeves at that age. I was so happy when I learned there were more of them!

Oh how I would like a Jeeves to make me a patented pick-me-up, lay out my clothes and run a bath

I was a little younger I think but I vividly remember reading my first. I found a copy of Very Good, Jeeves at my grandma’s house in Yorkshire and started reading it while the adults had boring adult conversations. She said I could have it so I read it in the car on the way back to Essex that night, straining to keep reading as it got darker and in the end just snatching a few more pages of the swan and the cabinet minister every time we went through a town with street lights (it was not all motorways in those days!)

How serendipitous! I have literally just started re- reading PG Wodehouse via an omnibus that I downloaded on a whim a few months ago and agreed with every word written by @Harriet766 . I came to Wodehouse at 12, courtesy of my older brother and he has influenced my way of speaking and writing ever since. I am still laughing out loud as I read him for the umpteenth time. As for the changing social mores, I was fascinated by the glimpse the books offered me into another world ( Mansion flats! Gentlemen's clubs!). I think we should read books that are of another time and place to really understand the world.

I had a very difficult time as a teen in the late 80s, 90s and i am remembering now how the wonders of Wodehouse brought me through so much. His writing is just joyous and funny and a celebration of being human. I now must rush off and order some for my kids.

Such wonderful books. Love them, this is a great thread, am definitely going to download them all now ready for my holiday next week.

Thanks OP.

If one could live in literature I’d choose to live in a Wodehouse novel.

I read every one my (excellent) public library had the summer I was 22. It was a glorious summer, and Wodehouse inevitably reminds me of sunny days.

I remember snorting laughing on the bus to and from work so often the bus driver eventually asked what I was reading every morning.

Yes, same here. I want to wake up to Jeeves opening the curtains, serving me a cup of tea and telling me the weather is “inclement”.