Leave It to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse

Psmith was one of the first and now probably the least-known of P.G. Wodehouse's series characters [1]: he appeared in four novels, and is part of Wodehouse's transition from his original style of school stories into the wider comedic novels of his mature period.

Leave It to Psmith is the fourth, last, and best of those novels: it appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1923 as a serial and then soon afterward in book form. It is also a Blandings Castle novel; even this early, Wodehouse was mixing and matching his series, as if they all lived in the same, consistent world. It's actually only the second Blandings novel, after the 1915 Something Fresh; it's early enough that Lord Emsworth is still obsessed with flowers rather than pigs.

We originally met Psmith in school, where he quickly overshadowed the supposed hero, Mike Jackson. He's tall, thin, well-dressed, and gifted with both an unstoppable flow of patter and an unassailable belief in his ability to handle anything at all. (The reader can see why Wodehouse dropped him so early: a character who can accomplish anything can become difficult to handle in the main role, and works better as a supporting act, as with Jeeves or Uncle Fred.) The two middle Psmith books - Psmith in the City and Psmith, Journalist - were transitional books, mixing comedy and thriller plots. Leave It is basically mature Wodehouse, with some guns and criminals but treating them in a comic way.

Psmith is a young man looking out for his next adventure here; he has been working for a relative in a business involving fish - actual, cold, dead fish, which Psmith has come to realize he does not like at all - and is now ready to do just about anything else:

LEAVE IT TO PSMITH!
Psmith Will Help You
Psmith Is Ready For Anything
DO YOU WANT
Someone To Manage Your Affairs?
Someone To Handle Your Business?
Someone To Take The Dog For A Run?
Someone To Assassinate Your Aunt?
PSMITH WILL DO IT
CRIME NOT OBJECTED TO
Whatever Job You Have To Offer
(Provided It Has Nothing To Do With Fish)
LEAVE IT TO PSMITH!

That's the advertisement he places in a major London newspaper. It draws the attention of Lord Emsworth's dim son Freddie, who - as so often is the case in Wodehouse - desires to help his uncle steal his (the uncle's) wife's necklace and use that to support his (still the uncle's) stepdaughter. The stepdaughter, to make it even more complex, is married to Mike Jackson, Psmith's old school chum.

Freddie travels to London, to meet Psmith, at the same time Emsworth is heading up to meet a famous Canadian poet and bring that poet to stay at Blandings for an extended visit - Lady Constance, Emsworth's sister and the current owner of the necklace to be stolen, is very fond of literary figures and have been inflicting a series on them on Blandings for several years.

Of course this all leads to Psmith coming to Blandings as an impostor, pretending to be that Canadian poet. And he has fallen in love with the young woman just hired to catalog the Blandings library. And there are other, more sinister figures, looking to steal the necklace as well.

This is mature-period Wodehouse, so it's complex and witty and full of wonderful writing - his later books were still fun and wonderfully written, but the plots tended to thin down a bit. Here Wodehouse is still on the way up, adding in complication after complication and delighting in the chaos it creates.

Wodehouse's books are not serious in any way, and are wonderful precisely because of that. They create their own world, and explore all the permutations of that stranger, sillier, more entertaining and lovely world - this is one of the earliest of his best books, and a good place to start for readers who haven't discovered Wodehouse yet. It's also a good place to dive in for people who have only read Jeeves and Wooster - Blandings has another half-dozen novels basically as good as this, even if the prior Psmith books are odder and quirkier.

[1] With an asterisk on both counts for Ukridge, who was slightly earlier and even more obscure now.

Beat It, Rufus by Noah Van Sciver

Noah Van Sciver has a muse of cringe and self-obsession; that can't be easy. His characters often have boundless and unsupported faith in their own meagre abilities, a disinclination to look solidly at the world that actually exists, and a pugnacious optimism untethered by any kind of sense or reason. Fante Bukowski is his most famous example.

Rufus Baxter is another in that mold. He was the guitarist and asshole driving force of the hair metal band Funky Cool, almost forty years ago, when they got a deal with an exploitative minor-league label to record a cassette-only release before a plane crash killed the other two-thirds of the band. Since then, apparently, he's been gigging constantly, with no actual success. He has an agent...who books him for things like weddings two states away on one day's notice, because that's all Rufus is good for.

Rufus, of course, believes he's the last great rocker, a titan of the industry, a man who's had a few bad breaks (ancient car on the verge of death, living in a storage unit because he has no money, no friends or family or support structure of any kind). He's wrong. Comprehensively wrong, in almost every possibly way. But he's a Van Sciver main character, so realizing that will never happen.

Beat It, Rufus is the story of Rufus's cross-country odyssey over a few days. It follows the usual pattern: he loses what little he has, and goes on an epic journey to reclaim what he thinks is rightfully his (the expected massive royalties from that cassette), having various adventures and losing even more along the way. He reconnects with the girlfriend he had just before he "hit big," is repeatedly visited by the devil (and, much later and to less effect, the angel) on his shoulder, plays a random show with a random band, tracks down the office of that (long-failed) record label, and learns that one of his two bandmates actually survived the crash.

That bandmate, "Doing it to the Max" Eckhart, is an actually successful musician, with a big house and a home studio and a bestselling "how I recovered" memoir and a thriving career writing jingles - all the things Rufus reflexively loathes, but takes advantage of at the end of his draining and self-destructive odyssey.

It all ends in a "Lady and the Tiger" ending - Rufus is scheming to steal from and take advantage of Max, even as Max is willing to help out Rufus in ways that we readers think would actually be more productive and useful.

But that's the point of characters like Rufus: they don't learn, they can't learn. The humor is because they always do the wrong thing. I find that kind of humor wearying, especially when, as with Van Sciver, it's pitched in a relatively realistic mode - Rufus isn't a cartoon to bounce back up from any hardship, but a real person in a real world, getting older and hurtling headlong toward the kind of death that will leave people vaguely happy but uneasy about it.

This is funny, and realistic: it moves well, Rufus is entirely believable, and the various scenes are all told well. But he's so self-delusional, such an asshole, that I felt like I needed a bath when I was done reading it. How any reader responds to it will largely depend on how much they like cringe comedy: this is all cringe, all the time.