Indiscretions of Archie by P.G. Wodehouse

I still have a dozen or so Wodehouse books on my shelf I haven't read - and intend to collect the thirtyish more in the Overlook series I don't own - so I think I'll keep reading them every three or four months from now until I run out. Some are surprisingly good - Piccadilly Jim, for example, was a fully-formed mature Wodehouse novel from 1917 with a great impostor plot.

Indiscretions of Archie, from the same era - originally published in 1921 - is somewhat lesser, but still amusing.

Reading it, I suspected it was originally a series of short stories, and I was right - this appeared as eleven stories in The Strand (and most of them also in Cosmopolitan - back in the days when the Atlantic was wider, writers could sell the same material on both sides of it) during 1920 and '21.

Wodehouse rewrote the whole thing somewhat to make it fit more into a novel form, but it's still exceptionally episodic. Our hero is Archie Moffam, a Great War veteran of good family and no money, who arrived in America to make his fortune and found it in Lucille Brewster, the usual beautiful young thing, who he met in Miami and married after a whirlwind courtship.

Lucille's father is Daniel Brewster, the millionaire owner and manager of the Cosmopolis hotel in New York - the self-proclaimed best hotel in town - and Daniel dislikes Archie intensely. (Archie is another one of Wodehouse's dim bulbs, unable to say anything clearly but not quite as prone to self-satisfaction and causing mayhem as Bertie Wooster.) Archie is supposedly looking for his life's work, but makes no effort at doing so at any point in the novel - the premise is not that he's trying his hand at different jobs, with humorous results, but just that he's supposed to be finding himself a career, and not just sponging off his rich father.

But he is: the stories are of Archie helping friends, getting involved in various odd Wodehousian events (there's a pie-eating contest he puts a ravenous teen boy up for, two different unsuitable theatre-connected fiancées for his brother-in-law, an old war acquaintance with amnesia, and a stint with Archie as an artist's model, among a couple of others), and usually annoying his father-in-law along the way. Most of them leave the situation at status quo ante, but, as the book gets into the back quarter, one gets a sense Wodehouse realized he needed to have something like an ending, so Archie wins the role of manager at the new hotel Daniel is building downtown.

Oh, that hotel isn't constructed before the novel is over: Archie never works a day in the book. But he has the promise of a job and a career, and, at the very end, there's also the only Wodehousian reference to a pregnancy I can remember. (It is an exceptionally circumloqutious reference - touching primarily on Daniel going to become a grandfather - and I'm not sure whether to attribute that to Wodehouse or to 1921 or both.)

So this has some amusing Wodehouse material, but it's a clump of short stories standing up in a trenchcoat and pretending to be a novel. If you know that going in, it can be quite entertaining, but don't expect anything like an overall plot.