P. G. Wodehouse, _Life with Jeeves_

 THIS SOLID PENGUIN volume from 1981 brings together The Inimitable Jeeves (1923), Very Good, Jeeves! (1930), and Right Ho, Jeeves (1934), all from right in the sweet spot of the Jeeves novels. In the post-WW II Jeeves novels, the unreality and anachronism of Bertie-world is so pronounced that not even Jeeves quite redeems things. The Jeeves novels of the 1920s and 1930s are unreal and anachronistic enough, God knows--no shell-shocked WWI veterans, no General Strike, no Slump, no rise of fascism (though The Code of the Woosters has a telling satire on Oswald Mosley)--but Bertie Wooster's circumstances and problems do not seem quite as far-fetched in the interwar novels as they do in the postwar novels.

Summary is pointless--in each novel, the obtuse upper-class twit par excellence Bertie Wooster blunders his way into some sticky mess from which he is extricated by the masterly intelligence and voluminous knowledge of his valet, Jeeves. Bertie, whose intelligence and knowledge are relatively circumscribed, nonetheless makes an excellent narrator, vivid and hilarious, with an unmistakable stylistic verve.

I found myself wondering whether anyone had thought to apply Hegel's master-slave dialectic to Bertie and Jeeves. It turns out at least one person has: Kirby Olson in "Bertie and Jeeves at the End of History: P. G. Wodehouse as Political Scientist," published in the journal Humor in 1996. Beneath the hilarity, Kirby writes in his abstract, "lurks a sustained political thinking which has surprising similarities with  leftist social theory." Wodehouse does not get much credit as a member of the revolutionary literary vanguard, but it is high time he did. W

Peter Orner, _Still No Word from You_

 I DO MISS The Believer, one of the country's most consistently worthwhile periodicals. It's where I first read Michelle Tea, Madelyn O'Gieblyn, and quite a few others, including Peter Orner, whose "Notes in the Margin" were a regular feature: short, punchy, personal essays on writers, sometimes famous ones but more often "writer's writers," and books, sometimes famous ones but more often relatively neglected, out-of-print ones. There would usually be four or five Orner essays scattered through an issue, usually occupying half a page or so, and they were always worthwhile.

Still No Word from You collects 107 short Orner essays, quite a few of which appeared in The Believer. Most are about particular books or writers, although a few are more traditional personal essays (e.g., a quick sketch of his father's electrician). The writers are not exactly unknowns, but do tend to be ones you hear about less often (Penelope Fitzgerald, Wright Morris, Stacy Doris).

Reading whole batches of Orner pieces at once, rather than a few sandwiched between longer pieces, makes for a different and maybe not quite as satisfying reading experience, somewhat like polishing off a box of chocolates all by yourself over the course of an hour. His own memories, often painful (estrangement from his father, a failed first marriage, career disappointments), are often hinted at in the essays, hovering in the background, but when the essays are read in one go, the painful bits drift more into the foreground, throwing longer shadows on the essays' love and appreciation of particular books. If I read the collection again, I might restrict myself to an essay a day, short as they are.

That love and appreciation still shine through, though. Orner's mindful attention to so many writers who merit attention but only occasionally get it--Larry Levis, William Bronk, Gary Lutz--and the precision and energy with which he conveys what he has found make this a book that, like the books he writes about, at least a few people are going to find and cherish.

Ruben Bolling, _Tom the Dancing Bug: All-Mighty Comics_ and _Tom the Dancing Bug: Into the Trumpverse_

 I HAD BEEN reading reprints of Ruben Bolling's brilliant comic Tom the Dancing Bug for years in the Funny Times when I saw an ad for the All-Mighty Comics collection and thought, hmm, that is probably good. And I was right.

If I am reading the copyright page correctly, the collection was first published in September 2022, but it gathers comics from 2003-06. On the cover is one of Bolling's wittier conceits: God-Man, i.e., God imagined as a white-bearded 1950s-1960s comic book superhero, his adventures a series of theological conundrums. Just as enjoyable are Louis Maltby, an adolescent male whose obtuseness about himself and other human beings was painfully recognizable to me, and Harvey Richards, lawyer for children, who in one comic herein explores the legal scope of "cross my heart and hope to die." Then there is Lucky Ducky, one of the working poor, who always winds up with some unexpected benefit, of sorts, from capital's relentless campaign to destroy his meager means of subsistence.

Bolling's wit is original, his satire politically astute, but his great gift is versatility. A God-Man page really does look like a 1950s vintage DC comic; Lucky Ducky looks like he was drawn by Carl Barks himself. Bolling frequently draws on old comics for inspiration, and whether the source is genius (Peanuts) or thoroughly mediocre (The Lockhorns), Bolling captures its likeness uncannily well.

The strips in Into the Trumpverse (which collects more recent strips, 2016-19) include several examples of Bolling's most successful attempt at putting to incisively satiric purpose his ability to capture the image and spirit of a classic comic: "Donald and John," which re-purposes the world of Calvin and Hobbes. John, a "publicist" Trump pretended to be back when he was making calls trying to get himself on the front pages of the supermarket tabloids, is Hobbes, the imaginary-friend-as-enabler, and Trump, of course, is Calvin, a shameless fantasist with an instinct for making trouble and a desire to see himself as all-powerful as a Tyrannosaurus Rex. That Calvin is seven or eight makes it possible for us to adore him a bit, so Bolling's "Donald and John" may provide insight into why some adore Trump at the same time that it makes devastatingly clear that for four long years our nation's chief executive was a hulking, 70-year-old brat.

Hernan Diaz, _Trust_

 CRAFTIER THAN USUAL for a Pulitzer winner, it seems to me. Most of the recent winners have been excellent novels, I would say. The winning books by (for example) Colson Whitehead, Richard Powers, Joshua Cohen, and Viet Thanh Nguyen were all thematically compelling, richly imagined, and masterfully written but tended to play by the usual rules (The Underground Railroad not so much, perhaps, but The Nickel Boys was fairly straightforward). Trust demands that you stay on your toes as a reader as well as being being thematically compelling, richly imagined, and masterfully written.

Trust purports to be four different texts by four different authors. The first is a slightly catty gossip-based novel by one Harold Vanner, about Benjamin and Helen Rask--a wildly wealthy financier of the 1910s and 1920s and his wife, whose high-profile patronage of the arts is derailed by the wife's mental disintegration. This part conjured up Henry Blake Fuller, Louis Auchincloss, that sort of thing.

The second is an unfinished--and fatuous and self-serving--memoir by Henry Bevel, who, we gradually realize, is the real-life model of Benjamin Rask. Rask is obviously mighty pissed-off at the Vanner novel and wants to set the record straight, as it were, not that he is going to openly acknowledge the existence of either Vanner or his novel. He just wants to make clear that financiers are the real backbone of the country and that his wife Mildred was a sweet guileless woman with her whimsical art projects who unfortunately died young of a terrible incurable disease.

You don't suppose that a busy man like Henry Bevel has the time to write his own memoir, do you? No, no--he hired a ghost writer, whose story we get in the third section. Ida Partenza, writing her own memoir decades later, describes how Bevel hired her, what he wanted, and she managed to intuit the  written voice Bevel wanted to have and convey Bevel's message. Almost needless to say, Ida is a hell of a lot more interesting than Bevel, and she suspects there is a lot more to Mildred than either Bevel or Vanner grasped--

--a suspicion confirmed when Ida turns up the journal Mildred Bevel's kept during her final illness. Not only is her patronage of the arts much more important than the dilettantish activity described by Vanner and Bevel (she backs Hindemith and Alban Berg), but she is actually the real brains of her husband's operations.

What is the book about? The power of money, for one thing, of the power of enormous wealth to actually bend the course of events, about male obtuseness, about the stories that don't get told but still leave traces by which they can be reconstructed, if you know where to look.