The Small Bachelor by P.G. Wodehouse

I'm sure this novel originated in someone talking about "a small bachelor apartment," which got Wodehouse into thinking about who would obviously live in such a place. Well, actually, The Small Bachelor was originally a 1917 musical comedy by Wodehouse and Guy Bolton before Wodehouse novelized it a decade later, so it might have been Bolton who had that thought.

But you know what I mean: someone made that leap, saw a title in it, and, after the writing mills had ground sufficiently, first the play and then the novel emerged.

The novel was serialized in Liberty magazine in 1926 and published in book form a year later, so it's nearly a century old. Some of the details - that was the era of Prohibition, and a raid on a restaurant that provides illegal libations is prominently featured in the climax - are a bit outdated, but Wodehouse's love stories and his broadly-drawn characters are as close to universal as anything is in this world.

The titular bachelor is the timid George Finch, a young man from Idaho who inherited a pile of cash from a relative and moved to Greenwich Village to become an artist. We don't see him paint or interact with models; the narrative and several characters declare he's a lousy artist, but his career (or lack thereof) is mostly a signpost rather than a plot element. He lives in a small penthouse on top of the Sheridan Apartment Building, well-provided with a sleeping porch that will be important to the action and with a fire escape that leads down to the aforementioned restaurant, the Purple Chicken.

George, in best Wodehouse manner, saw a young lady (Molly Waddington) on the street and fell in love with her. Luckily, she reciprocated almost immediately; she's been looking for a small cuddly man who gets flustered when she smiles at him.

Unluckily, Molly is provided with a formidable stepmother and a formerly rich and now henpecked father, Sigsbee H. Waddington. Both have odd manias: Sigsbee is obsessed with The West (as in the romantic image of cowboys from Zane Grey novels and Tom Mix movies), and Mrs. Waddington is hellbent on getting her stepdaughter married to a young English nobleman, Lord Hunstanton. She also takes against George immediately, mostly because he's an artist and so (she assumes) both poor and licentious - neither of which are even close to true. 

Also: there's nothing really wrong with Hunstanton, and he doesn't get a lot to do in the novel - he's not a villain, just the wrong guy for Molly.

That's not nearly enough complications for a Wodehouse story, so George's valet, Frederick Mullett, is also a reformed burglar affianced to a very successful pickpocket, Fanny Welch. A policeman who wants to be a poet, Garroway, also figures prominently. The glue bringing most of these characters together is the successful self-help writer J. Hamilton Beamish, who lives in an apartment downstairs from George. Oh, and also Mrs. Waddington's favorite medium, Madam Eulalie, who Beamish falls in love with and also coincidentally comes from the same small Idaho town as George. Also important, very Wodehousianly, is a sheaf of stock certificates in a motion-picture company which are currently valueless and which Sigsbee wants to unload on someone, as well as a supposedly very valuable pearl necklace, meant to be part of Molly's trousseau, which Sigsbee had replaced with a cheap fake in order to get the funds to buy those stock certificates.

About midway through the novel - I'm going to guess to be the big scene before the intermission when this was a play - there's a Long Island wedding, at which Fanny Welch is hired by Sigsbee to pretend to be an abandoned love of George's and steal the necklace in the ensuing confusion. The wedding doesn't happen, of course, and the action shifts for the rest of the novel to primarily that small bachelor apartment and nearby environs, where policemen are assaulted, gossip columnists are plied with salacious details of the busted wedding, various characters hide under beds or are locked in the apartment, the Purple Chicken is raided by a large number of brawny policemen with several major characters present, windows are used for illegal entry and hot soup is very nearly stolen.

In the end, Sigsbee regains a fortune, Mrs. Waddington is humbled, and George heads off into wedded bliss with Molly. Along the way, Mullett and Fanny have already married, and Beamish and Eulalie are on their way to the registrar as well - I can't recall a Wodehouse book with such a blizzard of wedding rice at the end.

This is not one of Wodehouse's very best books - there are a number of elements that aren't leveraged as well as they could have been, and others that a maturer Wodehouse would have made more out of - but it's a solid B- Wodehouse, funny and quick and amusing, particularly for being a century old.