Customer Reviews

Hot Water

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It is refreshing to be able to escape Wooster, Blandings & Psmith for a while an excellent book which is much more complex than usual.

This is a simply delightful read. I laughed out loud at the silliness. Packy's never ending exploits are addicting! This is a sheer delight to read. Wodehouse has a wonderful command of the language.

One of the best... Completely whacky & Wodehousian. Jane Opal is one of my favorite PGW girls.

In his introduction to the Penguin paperback of Hot Water, Robert McCrum notes that little-known books like this one are every bit the equal of the better-known Wodehouse fare. Maybe not every bit the equal, but certainly rather close. So why four stars? I can't give every PGW book five stars, although if PGW doesn't deserve five stars, who does? My first take is that this novel is even more convoluted than the typical Wodehouse offering, and the plot, such as it is, as McCrum points out, would be impossible to describe.

So I won't try. Suffice to say that although you don't find Jeeves on holiday at St. Rocque, or Stiffy Bingham rendering the Chateau Blissac (which has burglars the way other houses have mice) unfit for man or beast, you do find a cast of hitherto unknown personnel engaging in similarly mischievous, conniving, and ultimately good-hearted antics, leading through the most unlikely turnings to one of those trademarked Wodehousian happy endings. In fact, the very absence of Drones, Crumpets, and the Oldest Member (and their assorted musings) make this 1932 French farce read like a stage play. Add a few songs and you've got a Guy Bolton-type musical. Even moreso than A Damsel in Distress, which hit the silver screen starring Gracie Allen (Burns), Hot Water is ready for the big time.

This is one of the many nearly-unknown PGW novels being brought into print in Overlook Press' new line of PGW hardbacks. That will delight those PGW collectors who want library quality editions (and sell to libraries). I, however, find these new Penguin paperbacks to be just the thing to stash in the pocket or the backpack, the literary equivelant of tea time, so as always to have this light refreshment close at hand. David Hitch's illustrations seem to me to strike just the right note, and I hope Penguin brings us the entire line of Wodehouse in these editions.

This 1932 book by P.G. Wodehouse is a well written, if frivolous, farce, set in a chateau in a French seaside village. Several characters, including an hypocritical American senator and his daughter, undercover detectives posing as servants, professional burglars, French playboys, American football athletes turned up in the mansion, in a plot involving breaking into a safe in the house that has in it not only valuable jewels but a blackmailing letter. It's well written, reasonably funny and you can read it fast, despite not being a short book at all, but it is also a bit shallow.