Quick Service

Rating:
Summary: Your Good Health Awaits
Review: If laughter is the best medicine, then those who read Wodehouse are destined to live until 130. Quick Service, one of Wodehouse's non-series novels, is the ultimate pick-me-up. It is a novel filled with great schemes got astray, suspicious butlers, Americans who appropriately respond to the most difficult questions by saying: "Yeah", and the most delicious sounding, toothsome Paramount Ham. This novel has threads galore, twisting and entwined, and only a Master like Wodehouse could bring it all to such a satisfying conclusion.

But the main reason to read Quick Service is to make the acquaintance of Joss Weatherby. After it was over and the brain-box slowly pondered the preceedings, it came to me that Joss is a combination of Bertie and Jeeves rolled into one. On the Bertie front, Joss is quite capable of getting himself into one scrape after another without even trying. On the Jeeves front, he is able to rescue himself from these scrapes by using his flashes of genius. Also, Joss is a total charmer. It is not hard to see why Sally (our heroine) quickly joins the Weatherby ranks. I would love to have another novel and another chance to read more Joss adventures.

Quick Service is now the third non-series Wodehouse I have read. I highly encourage those who have primarily feasted on Blandings and Jeeves to try these non-series gems. They are just as satisfying as any of the others. And we get a clear resolution of the scrapes within each novel.

So, go out there, hunt in your used bookstores, or wait until the publishers have the good sense to re-issue Quick Service. But read it! The lips will curl, the teeth will part, and the laughter will flow. And if this is medicine, your good health turly awaits!

Rating:
Summary: Short and Sweet and Funny
Review: This is one of Wodehouse's many, many novels, and one of the more charming ones, due mostly to the main character, Joss Weatherby, a bright, exuberant, insanely optimistic and intelligent young artist who falls in love with Sally, a poor relation & companion to Mrs. Steptoe, a wealthy ex-American determined to enter and conquer the landed and titled social circles of England. Sally, a bright and feisty girl, is engaged to the Lord Holbeton, a spineless, intellectually-uninspired young man who sings "Trees" and whose money is held in trust by J.B. Duff, the Ham King, who is Joss' boss and was once in love with Mrs. Chavender who..... well, it's a typical Wodehouse plot, with people falling in and out of love, fortunes, inheritances held in trust getting in the way of people in love, obsessions with ham, bad indigestion, butlers going above the call of duty, paintings being stolen for nefarious purposes, all accomplished in loopy, flight-of-fancy, ingeniously light and happy prose that floats along, delightful and humorous. A Wodehouse effort other than his Jeeves and Wooster books that I really liked.