The Man With Two Left Feet by P.G. Wodehouse

It can be odd to think of a book like this - a decade and a half into the author's career, his second collection of short stories and roughly twentieth book overall - as being part of the extreme early phase of his career. But that's what happens when you live to 93, publish a hundred books, and have a career stretching from 1902 to 1975.

The Man With Two Left Feet is an early P.G. Wodehouse book, from the era where he was transitioning from his early school stories into the frothy comedies he's best-known for. It was published in 1917, collecting a baker's dozen stories that appeared in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic in the previous years. It's cast most in light-magazine mode, with stories the reader is meant to take seriously but humorously, and there are a few elements and plot details Wodehouse would re-use later to better effect.

It does have the first Jeeves story, "Extricating Young Gussie," so early that Bertie has not yet developed a surname. Other than that, there are no recurring Wodehouse characters here - there are two linked stories told from the POV of a dog, under the title "The Mixer," but that's as close as we get. 

As with a lot of Wodehouse, the plot structure tends to be romance - young men pursuing young women with mostly pure motives in mind, or young women going about their lives and having young men pop up and romance them. There is a bit of larcenous behavior, especially in the first of the stories narrated by the dog, in the mature-Wodehouse manner and light tone. And most of the stories take place in New York: Wodehouse was successful for about a decade before this book by writing stories about exotic New York for London audiences and (less often) about exotic London for New York audiences.

So this is transitional Wodehouse, a little more conventional and pat-ending than we're used to - "At Geisenheimer's" in particular has a snapper of a mid-teens magazine ending that is just fine but doesn't feel particularly Wodehousian. I wouldn't recommend it to any reader who isn't at least forty books deep into Wodehouse; this is one of his works to save for the back half of your reading spree.