Piccadilly Jim by P.G. Wodehouse

The cliché is that P.G. Wodehouse created his own world, made up of one part Edwardian dandies, one part interwar froth, one or two parts traditional melodrama plots, and a whole lot of Wodehousian comedy and writing to tie it all together. It's mostly true: no one else wrote quite like him, and his mature books do have a consistent tone and voice, and circle a clear group of plots and ideas.

But, even more so: he reused characters and situations repeatedly. His main series - Jeeves and Wooster, Psmith, Blandings Castle - intersected with each other. I'm sure someone has already mapped the universe of Wodehouse, explaining how every character can be connected to every other character with something like a Bacon number.

So I should not have been surprised that the 1917 comedy Piccadilly Jim is, at least loosely, a sequel to Wodehouse's 1913 novel The Little Nugget. I was, just a bit surprised, in a happy way: the kidnappee of the older book, a horrible boy named Ogden Ford, is the kind of person you would never want to meet in real life but is a fine bit of spice in the right book.

Nugget was a transitional book, still basically taking its thriller plot seriously and having actual physical consequences and at least one scene with bullets whizzing by. Jim is a full-bore Wodehouse comedy, with an occasional concern about someone having to go to prison (played in a end-of-The-Producers kind of way) but mostly focused on the course of true love and the getting of enough scratch to set oneself up in life with the object of said love.

It's also got one of Wodehouse's most amusing impostor plots, with Jimmy Crocker pretending not to be Jimmy Crocker to woo the girl he loves but then posing as Jimmy Crocker to infiltrate her house. There are other impostors, too, of course - it's a Wodehouse comedy, and I believe they are required.

The plot is rarely the point of a good Wodehouse novel, but let me try to sum up: Crocker is a former New York newspaperman, whose father (a minor actor) has married one of a set of two formidable sisters, who have fallen out. Crocker, his father and stepmother live in London, where Crocker has a (very deserved) reputation as a hell-raiser, which is impeding the stepmother's attempts to get her husband a noble title.

His aunt (the other sister) is the mother of the previously mentioned Ogden and is married to a Wall Street financier - more importantly, connected to the financier's niece Ann, who is the red-headed spitfire Crocker falls for - and this whole crew makes a quick visit to London to attempt to get Crocker to come work for the financier, for reasons that are clear enough early in the novel but have not remained clear in my memory.

Anyway, Crocker falls for Ann - but she hates him, since, five years before, she published a slim volume of verse that was absolute glurge, and newspaperman Crocker interviewed her for a piece absolutely making fun of her. She remembers this vividly; he had entirely forgotten.

So he follows her back to New York, taking the same ship and pretending to be someone else called Bayliss. And he does eventually take up residence in his aunt's house, pretending to be himself. There, various criminals and international agents are not only circling to make another kidnapping attempt on Ogden, but also trying to steal a new powerful explosive, invented by one of the many "young and unrecognized geniuses" the aunt has gathered about her as a literary salon.

The explosive is stolen, Ogden is kidnapped, the impostors unmasked, hard-boiled detectives hired, and so forth - not quite in that order, but you get the idea. Crocker wins Ann's love in the end. And there are a whole lot of wonderful, funny Wodehouse asides and thoughts and business along the way. This may be over a hundred years old, but it's still great: one of the earliest clearly-mature Wodehouse novels. 

Portions for Foxes: Shannon Worrell

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

I don't have enough happy love songs in this series, so, as the year's closing out, let me get one more in.

Well, it's mostly happy. No lives are completely happy, so there's some worries seeping in around the edges. But this is a song about making the most of right now, about being in love with someone you know well, about finding your joy where and when you have it.

It's C'mon Catherine by Shannon Worrell, from the 2008 record The Honey Guide.

It's another one of those songs obscure enough that I can't find lyrics online, so anything below is from my listening and typing and rewinding - possibly wrong, but, I hope, well-meant.

C'mon Catherine
Let's bossa nova in the afternoon
Winter will be here too soon

There's repeated mentions of ending, which might be just the general "end" - not of this relationship, or anything else major like that. Just that life is short, and enjoying it is what we have to do now.

Driving 220 in the snow
Listening to the radio
Made me promise not to see that other girl again

But maybe not - the singer is hearing "a September song." This might be a song about love about to be lost after all, for all my optimism. But, even if it is, even if something is time-limited and fragile, it can be beautiful and true and wonderful while it lasts. That's what this song says. And it has a fine fiddle behind Worrell's lovely expressive voice to do it, and a sound like a hills ballad you've been hearing all your life.

Growing grapefruit
Lemons and tiny tangerines
This is the most a life can mean
On the terrace in the sun
We ate every single one
That was another year I swore I'd never leave

In this season, I hope you all have things in your own life that make you feel that way, that this is the most a life can mean.

Quote of the Week: But Not Flying

Hundreds of nuns are in town this week. I've seen nuns with green habits, pink habits. Bad habits! Nuns vaping, nuns cutting in line. Right now, nuns are running, laughing, elbows pumping and veils flying. The security gates on the north side of St. Peter's Square just opened, and a group from the front of the line are rushing for front-row seats at whatever services Pope Francis is about to hold inside the basilica.

 - Mary Roach, Animal Vegetable Criminal, p.232

Well, This Is Me by Asher Perlman

Asher Perlman is a New Yorker cartoonist, which I mention up top since it's divisive for some. I like that style of humor - arch wordplay, light cultural references, usually based in a modern urban lifestyle - but not everyone does.

Well, This Is Me is the first collection of his work, gathering about a hundred and fifty cartoons plus three new interstitial pieces (Introduction, Interlude, and Epilogue) in which a cartoon Perlman talks about his work in an deliberately humorous over-intellectual style to another character who gets fed up with that.

Back when I was a wee lad, cartoon collections like this just shoveled the cartoons in willy-nilly, and didn't show any evidence of organization. You got two hundred Charles Addams cartoons, in whatever order they were in after the editor dropped the file three or four times, and you liked it. Nowadays - my theory is because desktop publishing makes it easy to move things around, but that explanation is a good thirty years old now - cartoon collections tend to have thematic chapters, as if we all think "OK, I want to read a bunch of Peter Arno cartoons right now, but only if they are all about animals."

Whatever the reason for it, that's what Perlman does: there are four major sections. The first one is titled "Well, This is Work" and the others cover Play, Love, and Life. They are vague, and a really argumentative reader could probably find a few to insist they should really be in another category. But the categories are broad enough that we don't get, say, ten doctor's-office cartoons in a row.

Perlman is smart and funny and has both amusing wordplay and amiably dumpy people in his cartoons: he's good at all of the pieces of the cartooning gestalt. He writes funny and he draws funny. There are a dozen or more cartoons here that I let out audible noises while reading - maybe not a full guffaw, but some variety of quick laugh. And there are about as many cartoons where I thought the idea and the specific wording was brilliant - some of these are the same cartoons as the forced-me-to-make-noise ones, I guess.

Anyway: funny, smart, amusing. If you like New Yorker-style single-panel cartoons at all, you'll like this book.

Drafted by Rick Parker

I've grumbled here, a few times, about the ways comics memoirs get pushed to be "bigger." The market - or maybe just editors - want stories to be Important, to be Resonant, to be Striking. And creators, wanting to tell their stories, often bend to that market in one way or another.

But most lives aren't that big. What's interesting about them is the succession of small moments, the choice of paths, what it meant to the person at the time. Keeping that focus, and being both honest and interesting, can be tricky.

Rick Parker walks that tightrope with his memoir Drafted. There's material that lets the publisher (Abrams) be a bit expansive in their marketing copy: Parker was drafted in 1966, during the Vietnam era. As it happened, he never went overseas, but he didn't know that's how it would be at the time. And he's telling this in order, so on every page we only know what Parker knew at the time.

This was a brand-new book in 2024, so it's clearly Parker looking back a long ways. He wrote and drew this in his seventies, telling the story of himself at the ages of eighteen to about twenty-one. (To put it into personal perspective, Parker's entire military service happened up to about six months before I was born, and I am by no means a young man.)

It's a straightforward, crisply-told book. The young Parker was a bit naïve and sheltered - or, at least, older Parker presents his younger self that way - and there are multiple scenes where I wondered if young Parker didn't realize what other people were hinting about at the time, and Parker-the-creator resolutely doesn't explain or add context in retrospect. (In particular, on the day he musters out, there's a long, weird interaction with a fellow soldier and his wife that could have been a backhanded attempt at a threesome or a clumsy badger game - I'm not sure which, but young Parker doesn't seem to see either possibility, and Parker-the-narrator doesn't comment, either.)

Parker runs through those three years in the US Army chronologically, with a brief prologue about his childhood and seven numbered chapters for the major phases of his military career. He goes through basic, gets trained to drive a tank, is approved for Officer Candidate School and passes that, is commissioned as a first lieutenant and assigned to a missile program in the New Mexico desert, and does a few other odd assignments during his enlistment. It's all carefully observed, narrated with a lot of captions mostly in a factual vein, and in a precise, meat-and-potatoes style for both art and writing. Parker isn't trying to be fancy here, despite his long career as a fine artist. This is the clear story of what happened to him, with both the boring and unpleasant parts kept in for maximum transparency.

Drafted isn't quite what I expected, but it does exactly what it sets out to do, does it comprehensively, and tells a story that's both particular and general - Parker was one of more than two million draftees during the Vietnam era, so a lot of elements of his story will be familiar to many of those vets, and of interest to later vets and others.

Pick-Up by Charles Willeford

It's difficult to write about this book without giving away the sting ending. I'll do my best, but I may imply something, and you may guess. But Pick-Up was a 1955 paperback original, so you've had almost seventy years to be spoiled already.

This is a noir novel, I should say. Actually, I'd qualify that: it starts out a fairly straightforward, well-framed story of life on the bottom rung, wanders into noir as stories that like often do - particularly in mid-century, when there was a huge market for such - but then veers again, in the late chapters, to what I can only call anti-noir.

In a noir novel, everything conspires against the hero. The entire world seems to bend to hurt him, to break his will, to force him to do the unforgivable thing, to destroy him utterly in the end. There is no way out, no matter how much he struggles - whether he gleefully engages in crimes, or tries to stay honest and keep his head above water, it will come out the same way in the end: he will either die at the end of the book or be on his way to death.

Charles Willeford follows that model closely in the middle chapters here, but then - and I really can't put this any other way - turns it absolutely inside out at the end. That's the anti-noir bit, as if the universe is conspiring to clear this protagonist, to move obstacles from his way in much the same unexpected, doom-laden way as traditional noir. And that sting ending makes the anti-noir turn that much more puzzling: I don't want to overexplain or hint, but the sting is the kind of thing that would have fit much more comfortably in a traditional noir, the way the book was going already.

Pick-Up is the story of two alcoholics, who meet in the first chapter. Harry Jordan is the first-person narrator, a former painter and currently working at random odd low-level restaurant jobs in San Francisco. He would say he's not an alcoholic, and maybe he's right, technically. But he spends most of his time drinking or waiting to get to the next drink. Helen Meredith is an heiress, who spent her whole life under the thumb of a domineering mother and had a brief, horrible marriage. She's much worse than Harry, needing to drink vast quantities every day.

They meet, they fall in with each other, and Helen moves into Harry's flat in a roominghouse. They're happy, more or less. Harry paints a full-length nude portrait of Helen; we think this could potentially be the spark that puts him back on a good path, doing something more productive with his life.

But they're alcoholics. Helen much much worse than Harry: the kind of mid-century woman drunk who wanders off with any man (or three Marines, in one scene) willing to buy her drinks. Harry can't leave her alone, even to go to work for the day, and they're dirt-poor.

They're both also mildly suicidal: they have one shared attempt early in the book, which leads to a stay in a local mental hospital that doesn't help either of them. And this is noir, so things keep getting worse, more constricting. Until there only seems to be one way out.

It doesn't go the way they hope: things get worse for Harry. And then there's the turn at the end.

I suspect Willeford wrote Pick-Up to deliberately tweak the standards of its genre. I don't know how consistent he was in that. And I'm not a major scholar of his work: I read his late PI novels, and a bunch of his early noir, in the 90s when he had a revival soon after his death, but nothing since then, and I didn't make a particular study of him at the time.

This is a quirky, gnarly noir novel that does interesting things with the form. It has a weird ending, which readers sometimes react strongly to, one way or the other. And it's short, told quickly in the first person, in that traditional noir style. So it's a book that you might as well just read, if any of the above sounds intriguing. I knocked it off in two or three hours: it's worth at least that much time.

(I read this in the Library of America omnibus Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s. As far as I know, the text is the text, no matter what edition. The cover above is what it looked like the last time I read it, in the Black Lizard/Vintage Crime edition in the '90s. I suspect it doesn't look like that these days; books don't keep covers that long.)

The Unlikely Story of Felix and Macabber by Juni Ba and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

Knowing what needs to be said in a story, and what can just be implied, is always tricky. We can all think of works that fail in both directions - overexplaining, or leaving things too murky.

I think The Unlikely Story of Felix and Macabber doesn't quite explain all of the things it should have - but it's close, and some readers might find the way it implies its world is just fine. So let me just note that, and note that this is writer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou's first graphic novel, and point out that traditionally ties go to the runner.

I have no quibbles about the art by Juni Ba, which is detailed in quirky, grotesque ways that fits this world perfectly. Also, I should say that the lettering is by Otsamane-Elhaou - the sound effects are particularly fun, and he makes the captions and dialogue slightly italic to give the book a distinctive look, too.

I don't know if this book is specifically for younger readers, but it has a vibe that upper-elementary-school kids will probably enjoy, and the professional-wrestling influences also tend to make the violence stylized and bloodless in ways that are young-reader-friendly.

We're in a world of monsters - think Monsters, Inc., where everyone is a slightly different kind of creature, and you'll be close - where strength and fighting ability seem to be prized above all other traits. (Or, at least, this story deals with that side of this world.) A young, small monster named Felix is timid, bullied by a gang of other monsters from his school. They dare him to ring a random doorbell; he does. A craggy old monster answers the door, and seems to want to talk to this random small interloper for reasons that are never clear. He grabs at Felix, who runs away immediately, and loses his backpack to the old guy.

This is all heavily narrated, mostly in ways that tell us things we can already see on-panel rather than adding detail to the world - it's a very story-book voice, as if telling the story many years later.

Anyway, Felix is bullied at school and browbeaten by his parents and denigrated by his teachers: he's the usual mousy little guy who needs to learn to stick up for himself. In trying to get his backpack back, he accidentally stows away in the old guy's car - I suppose I should make it clear that the old guy is Macabber, the other half of the title - as he goes back to the town of his birth.

Macabber is the former World Champion of Monstering, hugely dominant in his era. Monstering is basically pro wrestling, only in a society of monsters where everyone has completely different bodies from each other. He left this town to go off for the big fights, leaving his former best friend behind. He never returned - until now, of course - in however many years it's been.

The town is a dump now, which everyone living there blames Macabber for. There's no reason for this I can figure out: it's a weird mix of "you're supposed to support the old neighborhood" and "you left us behind." And everyone is much more likely to resolve interpersonal conflicts by punching rather than talking about things, which may be one reason why we don't get any clear, or convincing, explanations.

Anyway, the local hooligans - little guys in knight's armor - find and harass and then recruit Felix, again for murky reasons. Macabber meets his once-best friend, sort-of apologizes for having a successful career elsewhere, and feels guilty. We get a lot of flashbacks to Macabber's fighting career, which was zippy and action-packed.

That portion of the story doesn't exactly resolve, but we flash forward suddenly, to see that Felix also goes into Monstering, and is even better at it than Macabber was - we get a few of his fights, too - but we mostly see him at the end of his career, rich and successful and done with it all.

Felix does not seem to have run away from any towns, or beaten up any of his best friends to do so, or run his career in any ways that would make us dislike him. But he has the same sad attitude at the end of his career Macabber did - not sad because it's over, not sad because he stomped over people to get there, but just generally sad because he's not sure if he's a good or bad person, I guess.

I want to say that the lesson Unlikely Story is trying to make - or the lesson it comes closest to making - is that fighting people for a living is a bad idea; that violence is never the answer, little trooper. But it's so clearly a book about how Monstering is fun and exciting and awesome that doesn't really seem to fit.

So I'm puzzled by Unlikely Story. It seems to want to give me a Lesson About Life, but its two characters are not parallel in any ways that reinforce the Lesson it seems to want to push. What they have in common, at the end of their careers, is a habit of speaking in vague circumlocutions - this may be more Otsmane-Elhaou's writing style - and a sense that they are sad because it's all over and they're no longer Monstering Champion of the World anymore, which, um, yeah, would be sad, wouldn't it?

Portions for Foxes: Tracey Thorn

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

As we get into the cold time of the year, here's something appropriate: a song of sadness and lost love and broken promises, about how everything gets worse, more complicated and more difficult as you get older, written by a great songwriter and sung by a great singer.

They're both the same person: Tracey Thorn. The song is unironically titled Oh, the Divorces! and it's from a record called Love and Its Opposite, which is mostly about the opposite.

It starts like this:

Who's next?
Who's next?
Always the ones the ones that you least expect
They seem so strong
It turned out she wanted more all along

The singer is not the one divorcing, which is unusual for a song like this. She's watching, seeing her social circle change and break - and there's an undertone of "how can I know I won't be next?"

Oh, I know we shouldn't take sides
But that one was his fault
This one is her fault
No one gets off without paying the ride
And oh, the divorces!

It's a quiet song, the kind of quiet that's all-encompassing and devastating. It's just Thorn's voice, close and confiding, over piano at first and then some light strings later, like you're listening in on her internal thoughts.

And it's a deeply adult song, in a way that feels rare: a song talking about a stage of life and a worry that's just not part of normal pop music. You have to walk down a lot of road to get to a song like Oh, the Divorces! That's one of the things I love about it.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of December 14, 2024

Four books this week, from the library, for complicated-but-silly reasons. (Those reasons, in more detail than you want: my twentysomething kids and I watch a movie together every Wednesday, while The Wife is off at Bingo. I'm basically the one who picks the movies. I get them from the library a lot. This week, it was Die Hard for obvious seasonal reasons. Since I was placing one hold, I also put holds on some books I wanted to read, and these are them.)

I'm already halfway through Oliver Darkshire's Once Upon a Tome, the 2022 memoir of bookselling by the guy who runs the Twitter feed for Sotheran's, a venerable London antiquarian bookshop. (Well, I think he still runs it, and I think it still exists after the X-odus, but I'm petty enough not to give Musk any traffic right this second by checking.) Darkshire has a great smart-but-not-fussy, self-deprecating style that always feels quintessentially British to me, and it comes through in the book as it did in shorter Internet posts.

Everything Is Fine, Volume 1 is the first collection of a Webtoon by Mike Birchall, who is also coincidentally British. I thought it was somewhat more of a complete story than it turns out to be - it has the first sixteen (says the back cover; though it has nine chapters inside) episodes of what I see already has ninety episodes in three seasons and is not done yet. (Webtoons seems to have something of a manga model: shortish episodes weekly for as long as the audience can stand it.) This is some manner of horror comic, set in a neighborhood of people who all wear giant cat-head masks, are subject to continuous surveillance, and must stay resolutely positive at all times, even though <something creepy that's not clear yet> has already happened and/or is still happening.

Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy is a teen romance comic by Faith Erin Hicks from 2023. She always does good stuff, even if most of it seems to be aimed at teens these days. (No serious complaints there: it's a big audience, especially for graphic stories, and I like creators to have careers that let them eat and live indoors and all that stuff. And I usually find those stories fun, even if I am very far from being a teenager these days.) I think the title gives all of the important details, but I'll see if I agree after I read it.

And last is Norse Mythology, Vol. 1, which is a comics adaptation of the first half (I think) of Neil Gaiman's book of that name. P. Craig Russell did the adapting, and several of the sections, with other artists joining in: Mike Mignola, Jerry Ordway, David Rubín, Jill Thompson, and several more.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: What Do All the People Know

It had snowed continuously for two days, and this morning everything appeared to stand in hushed amazement before the spectacle of such expanses of unbroken whiteness on all sides. People said it was unheard of, that they had never known weather like it, that it was the worst winter in living memory. But they said that every year when it snowed, and also in years when it didn't snow.

 - John Banville, Snow, pp.13-14

Quote of the Week: Never Disappointed

Nell wasn't a great one for compliments, she didn't like people getting above themselves. Nell had adopted the philosophy that, generally speaking, things tended always to get worse, rather than better. This pessimistic outlook was a source of considerable comfort to her - after all, unhappiness could be relied upon in a way that happiness never could.

 - Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, pp.85-86

Snow by John Banville

Snow is officially a mystery novel, by a literary writer. To add a wrinkle, author John Banville has written mysteries before - has written mysteries in what I think is this exact same milieu - under the name Benjamin Black. But I think this is the first novel to both be called "a mystery" and published as by Banville.

I suspect that means this was an offshoot of the Black series - about a pathologist in 1950s Dublin called Quirke, who is mentioned but never appears in Snow - and that Banville, or his agent, or his publisher, decided somewhere along the lines that it was different enough that it would be a Banville book rather than a Black book, but that they would also call it a "mystery."

The main character is a detective, as is tradition for the form: St. John Strafford. (Pronounced "Sinjin," as he has to repeatedly note. With an "r" in the last name, ditto.) We are mostly in his head, in a limited third person narration, with a few literary-novel eruptions into other viewpoints that work but made me wonder if they were necessary. (Literary novelists sometimes err in the direction of expansiveness, trying to show all the world and make clear all the issues. And sometimes they err in the direction of hermeticism, leaving only clues and breadcrumbs to be as pure to their concept of the story as possible. Banville leans towards the former pole here.)

Strafford has been sent to a big manor house in the Irish countryside - Ballyglass House, in County Wexford (Banville's own birthplace). A priest, Father Tom Lawless, has been murdered there in the night. It is a few days before Christmas. (To the title: it has been snowing, and it continues to snow, off and on, throughout the novel. As Strafford literarily puts it "Snow was general all over Ireland.")

There are two kinds of mystery novel: the ones in which a good person was murdered, and ones in which a bad person was murdered. Tom Lawless was a priest in Ireland in 1957, and is the murder victim in a novel that came out in 2020. I'd say I'll let you guess what kind of victim he was, but a Catholic priest in a 2020 novel is 99% certain to be a villain. And he was, as we eventually learn.

Banville's deviations from his focus on Strafford - an opening two pages, detailing the murder, and a coda about three-quarters of the way through the novel, flashing back to Lawless a decade earlier (though, somewhat inconsistently, pretending to be a document he wrote sometime soon before his death) - are largely to make that villainy more obvious, especially that heavy-handed coda.

So we the readers start off with one question: why was Lawless murdered? If we are as cynical as I am, we quickly figure he was diddling someone, and then move on to the next obvious question: boys or girls?

Fairly early on, we learn that Lawless spent some years at a "school," and I'll avoid giving details to leave the previous question somewhat open. But Lawless, we eventually learn, was a piece of work, the kind of murder victim we are happy to see put in his grave.

But Strafford still has the job of finding out who and why, which he pursues through the aristocratic Catholic Osbourne family, Father Tom's hosts the night before, and through the local town. Neither group is particularly forthcoming, as is to be expected of a small town and an aristocratic family in a mystery novel. And Strafford declares himself not to be all that good at this detecting thing, as well - perhaps false modesty, since he does figure it all out by the end of this short novel.

Banville is a fine writer as always, but Snow has some deeply obvious things at its core that are somewhat unfortunate. His style keeps it from being the kind of thumping dullness that another writer might inflict, and the question of who actually killed Father Tom - in best mystery-novel fashion, nearly every character has a decent reason to have wanted to - is solidly mysterious until Banville reveals all at the end. But I thought Banville was trickier than this: the story of the murder of a sexually deviant Catholic priest in 1950s Ireland is the kind of thing I thought he'd leave to the more sensationalist crew.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 4: The Bell Warden by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

There is nothing particularly special about this fourth volume of the Lone Wolf and Cub series: no new revelations about our hero, Ogami Ittō, or his enemies the Yagyū clan, no flashbacks, nothing unexpected. There are four long stories here - each one seventy or eighty pages - in which our hero meets someone and then kills them, often with some Buddhist philosophizing along the way.

I expect most of the volumes of Lone Wolf and Cub will be like this: fine storytelling; intricate, dynamic art; deep psychological insight; inventive fighting implements used in interesting ways; glimpses into a distinct, particular historical world seen clearly and unsentimentally; stories of sudden violence about a man seeking vengeance in a dark and corrupt world. Those are all excellent things; the series is known as a masterpiece for a reason. But they won't be new things.

In the first, title story of Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol 4: The Bell Warden, Ogami Ittō is hired to "test" the three sons of the current bell warden of Edo - the man responsible for the network of towers that toll the hours and tell everyone what time it is. In typical fashion for this era and this people - or maybe just in this series; I don't have a separate deep knowledge of 18th-century Japan - the warden takes his role very, very seriously. (In this series, there are the good people, who think that what they do is the most important thing on earth and are willing, even happy, to die in the commission of their duties, and the bad people, who do absolutely anything and are driven by their desires.) So he is basically making a bet: at least one of my sons will be skilled enough to beat and kill one of the premier swordsmen in the entire country, and thus be worthy to continue the family line.

Spoiler! He loses that bet. Of course. The premise of the series is that Ogami Ittō wins. Every time, one way or another, up until the final battle with his ultimate enemy. And "winning" in this context always means killing the other guy. A samurai adventure series could hardly operate differently.

The three other stories have similar depth, and are similarly entangled in that Edo-era conception of propriety and right action and inevitable glorious death. It is, of course, a very dark, gloomy series at its core, set among men who dedicated their lives to slaughtering each other mostly for the benefit of a few feudal leaders. I'm finding reading one of these books about every six weeks to be about right: going much faster than that would be too much, a flood of stories too similar in tone to stand out from each other at that pace.

Hope It All Works Out! by Reza Farazmand

It's so nice when it happens good, as a great man once said. I saw this basically brand-new book somewhat randomly, thought "Hey! I've seen those cartoons before! They're funny!" and read the book. That's how it's supposed to work, and I hope this book finds success thousands of times that way.

You may have seen Reza Farazmand's Poorly Drawn Lines comics before - I seem to mostly see it on Facebook, because I Am Old, but I think it has an even larger presence on Instagram (which is probably also tending to the older side these days). Anyway, there's a website, and comics are posted and reshared in the usual social places, and then the great unwashed grab the comics they like and repost them all over the place - which is what I've mostly seen.

Farazmand self-published a few collections of the strip over the years - looks like four of them - but Hope It All Works Out! is the official fancy debut big-company collection, published by Simon & Schuster on September 24th. I see they're also doing a desk calendar for 2025, which I point you towards if you want Poorly Drawn Lines on a daily basis in the new year.

(You may say, "Andy! I thought S&S was a serious, literary, words-on-paper kind of publisher. Isn't this out of character for them? Aren't they too stuffy for cartoon publishing?" And I would smile and gesture vaguely at you, like the old guy on Kung Fu, because I know the ancient secrets - S&S was founded to make a buck as the first people to publish crossword puzzles in book form, and was famously trend-chasing in their earliest incarnation. So this is entirely in character, and shows they are still in touch with their deepest, most primal impulses as a business. Namaste.)

Poorly Drawn Lines is a gag-a-day strip, which are hard to write about - you may notice I'm vamping and throwing in my own gags here, which I often do with books that don't have a clear narrative I can just describe - but, basically, it's another modern strip with a cast of oddballs and a mildly sarcastic tone. In the modern straightforward way, the main characters are Mouse, Snail, Turtle, and Bird, who are each those things. Mouse is the Charlie Brown of the strip, I guess: he seems to be the closest thing to a central character, and the most introspective.

Farazmand's drawing is crisp and straightforward - thin lines, clear colors, almost design-y in its instant readability - as a frame for his mostly wordplay-based humor. I'll throw in an example here - it's on page 155 of the book, for those following along at home, and also available on the aforementioned website.

I say regularly that I wish there were more gag-a-day strips - that the energetic, fun ones online had a higher profile and the tired, zombie ones in the paper could be rejuvenated by new talent (a la Olivia Jaimes on Nancy) or just taken out back behind the barn. This is one of the ones that should be known better: it's good, funny stuff by a cartoonist who is actually alive and working on it right now, which sounds like a thing that shouldn't need to be specified but we live in a strange world.

So check it out. Or don't. I'm not your mother.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson

My cynical take on the literary novel: a literary novel is one where you the reader don't understand something important. To turn that into a positive, it's a novel big and complex and strong enough that there's more than any reader can exhaust in one reading - that there will be more to it every time you come back.

But it does leave you with at least that one big question.

In this case, for me it was: what does the title mean?

Behind the Scenes at the Museum was Kate Atkinson's first novel, winning the Whitbread in 1995. It's not about a museum.

It's set mostly in York - the old one, in Yorkshire, in the north of England - where there's a locally-famous York Castle Museum, I find doing some searching after reading the book. York Castle seems to be more focused on ordinary people's lives than the typical museum, which is one clue to the title. But I've never been to York, much less seen the museum exhibits. And my mental image of "museum" is big and old and probably just a bit dull, monumental stones and ancient gewgaws and random bric-a-brac once owned by some guy famous for killing a bunch of people.

This is not a novel about anything like that kind of museum. Again, it's not about any kind of museum. But it's a family saga, which means a novel about several generations - and, as usual for a family saga, mostly about the women, and often about the things that go wrong and how they struggle through life.

It's told by Ruby Lennox, starting with the moment of her conception in 1951. She is our omniscient narrator - well, omniscient when telling us about what's going on when she's in utero, and omniscient in the alternating Footnote chapters, which tell stories of other family members of the past, up through their own ends. She's not omniscient in her own life, in the numbered main chapters that march forward in time from 1951 through the next two decades.

Her voice is candid and discursive, friendly and engaging, immediate and funny. It's much stronger in the numbered chapters; she drops back a bit into the background when telling us about people who aren't Ruby Lennox.

I said this was a family saga, which back when I was in publishing we used to joke was code for "three generations of women." It's not quite code, and not quite three generations, but that's broadly true: this is the story of several generations, mostly of women, seeing them both as daughters in their childhoods and then as mothers, after their inevitable not-quite-right marriages and they try to raise children but turn out to be temperamentally bad at it. We see the men, too, but more from the outside - as fascinating, attractive figures as young men and as infuriating, often-unfaithful liars in their later years.

This is a big family, with a couple of dozen major characters across the three or four generations. But don't worry: a lot of them will die young. That doesn't mean they become less important, or stop being mentioned - the narrative bounces through timelines as it goes back and forth between the forward motion of the main numbered chapters and the historical Footnotes. And the dead are always there in a family: always remembered, as real as the people left behind.

Atkinson is amazingly funny here, particularly for a book with so much death and sadness in it: the historical timeline includes the two World Wars, both of which wallop this family, and plenty of smaller, more personal calamities. Multiple family members run off, never to be seen again. Several hallowed family stories - two of them about deaths - turn out not to be actually true.

You might have guessed I'm not going to give a plot synopsis. It's not the kind of book where that would be useful, and even the question of what order to tell things in would be fraught. But this is a big, funny, sad, true book, both mournful and joyful, that ends on a perfect note and is told beautifully in a glorious voice. I can easily see how it won an award, and I can easily see the strengths Atkinson brought to the later novels I've already read. As long as you accept that women's stories are worth telling, and telling well, in a literary novel - I don't think that should be controversial, but there are still troglodytes lurking here and there - this is a major, impressive, wonderful one.