French Leave by P.G. Wodehouse

As I continue my saunter through the odder ends of P.G. Wodehouse's oeuvre - I've already read the famous novels at least once - I'm testing my assumption that the early obscure books (pre-war) are generally better than the late obscure books (post-war).

Wodehouse was born in 1881. His first novel was published in 1902 and his last in 1874, just before his death at age 93. There were nearly a hundred different books in between, so there are a lot of datapoints and a lot of potential arguments to be made about that assumption of mine. The best thing is that, to make those arguments well, you need to read Wodehouse books, which are always fun, even if one wants to argue this particular one under the microscope is slightly lesser than some other Wodehouse novel.

French Leave is a short 1956 novel, somewhat out of character for Wodehouse in its setting. The main characters are three sisters from Long Island - two fairly standard romantic-comedy protagonists and one slightly older budding Forbidding Aunt - and the action takes place mostly in two French resorts, Roville and St. Rocque.

Kate, Josephine, and Teresa Trent run a farm, mostly of bees, and are not too unhappy there. But, when a play their late father wrote is sold to television, they each get a windfall about about two thousand dollars. And the two younger sisters, Jo and Terry, want to go to France to waste that money and, just maybe, find some millionaires to marry. Kate disapproves, but will go with them as a chaperone and to disapprove at close range.

Since their money is slim, to make it go farther they will alternately pose as each other's maid. First, in St. Rocque, Jo is "Miss Trent" and Terry is her maid "Fellowes." Jo has some dates with a man she thinks is suitable - but it turns out he's already married, so she flies back to America, alone, to marry the lawyer she was dating there.

Terry and Kate move on to Roville, setting up in the big fancy hotel there. Terry falls in love with Jefferson, Comte d'Escrignon - the half-American son of a penniless Marquis who writes for a living and is called "Jeff." French Leave is most Wodehousian in the way in which nearly every major character has an official name and then the name that people actually call them, most notably in Jeff's father, alternately Nicolas Jules St. Xavier Auguste, Marquis de Maufringneuse et Valerie-Moberanne and "Old Nick."

There are some ex-wives - of the Marquis in particular - and a parallel young couple of fairly dim but rich heirs to sparkling-water fortunes, who Jeff and Terry get somewhat entangled with. There's also an officious and somewhat corrupt local police Commissaire, who is aimed at Terry by that formidable ex-wife.

Of course, there are misunderstandings, primary among them about who is actually rich and who is not. (Terry is definitely not, though she's posing as an American heiress. Jeff has good prospects from his writing, but his father is penniless and their titles are very impressive but come with not a single sou.)

As any good Wodehouse book must, it ends with the young people getting married in the right permutations and the forces of repression and unhappiness (the Commissaire and the ex-wife primary among them) foiled.

Along the way, it's a bit more cumbersome than Wodehouse's better books - the whole deal with Jo feels extraneous to the central plot, which means the real complications don't start up until about 75% of the way into the book. But there's good material, especially about a publisher, Russell Clutterbuck, who is both a neighbor of the Trent sisters on Long Island and Jeff's great hope for fame and fortune. In the end, it's a slightly lumpy, not entirely well-shaped novel in the Wodehouse manner, quintessentially a book one can call minor but still enjoy reading.