Laugh and you laugh alone - humorous fiction - Good Old Books, part 2 - Bibliography

National Review, Dec 23, 1996 by Terry Teachout

'TIS the season to be jolly, Bill Clinton or no Bill Clinton. Unfortunately, some chronically morose folks on the Right have been finding it difficult of late to raise a smile over the decline and fall of Western civilization. It figures: dying is easy, comedy is hard. So in the interests of attitude adjustment, let me recommend a stockingful of comic novels suitable for holiday consumption and gift-giving. Put down your copies of Slouching towards Gomorrah, fellow pessimists, and repeat after me: Where there are laughs, there is hope.

For the benefit of those new to the genre, let's start with a run through the classics: if you haven't read Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, Peter De Vries's Madder Music, Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love, Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, or P. G. Wodehouse's Uncle Fred in the Springtime, stop here and start there. Each of these is paralyzingly funny, all are readily available, and there's plenty more where they came from.

Assuming you already know your way around the ample oeuvres of Waugh, Wodehouse & Co., I offer a half-dozen slightly more recherche suggestions:

The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy: Anyone capable of marrying Kenneth Tynan must have had a sense of humor, and Elaine Dundy's first book, originally published in 1958, proves the point. It's the stock Wanderjahr plot, transposed into a female key: Sally Jay Gorce, young, fairly innocent, and full of beans, heads for Paris in search of romance and adventure, gets more of both than she bargained for, and in the process makes modest headway toward maturity. The plot is helter-skelter and the end trails off into vapor, but the narrator's utterly feminine voice redeems all: "To have an affair with a man, and one's very first affair at that, just because he picks you up under rather romantic circumstances on the Champs-Elysees, takes you to the Ritz and things, and above all, because you're impressed with the fact that he has a wife and a mistress already, what could be more predictable? Tourist Second-Year Disorganized."

Pictures from an Institution, by Randall Jarrell (1954): This savage satire of life at a progressive women's college circa 1954 is so good, it made Whittaker Chambers laugh. Some characters are drawn from life (Mary McCarthy among them), but you don't need a scorecard to get the point, for every liberal fallacy of our time is here made as flesh: "The trouble with women, people say, is that they take everything personally; Flo took nothing personally. If she had been told that Benton, and Jerrold, and John, and Fern, and the furniture had been burned to ashes by the head of the American Federation of Labor, who had then sown salt over the ashes, she would have sobbed, and sobbed, and said at last -- she could do no other -- 'I think that we ought to hear his side of the case before we make up our minds."'

Father Malachy's Miracle, by Bruce Marshall (1931; hopelessly out of print, alas, though Ignatius Press will surely do something about that one of these days -- in the meantime, try your local library): This lovely, all-but-forgotten book tells the story of what happens when an easily exasperated priest, vexed to the utmost limits of his endurance by the invincible ignorance of the heathen multitude, requests God to confound them all definitively and simultaneously by working a jumbo miracle in broad daylight -- and God obliges, leaving the world agog. Libertarians of the village-atheist school should skip this case study in the Law of Unintended Consequences, but everyone else will find it just about perfect.

The Locusts Have No King, by Dawn Powell (1948): Long a fixture on short lists of Most Underrated American Novelists, Dawn Powell finally got lucky last year when Steerforth published her diaries and started reissuing her wicked novels. This is the best of the lot, a caustic tale of frustrated love and inadvertent success in postwar New York. Open at random and you'll strike gold every time: "Drama critics in the city, she often said, were like an old married couple; they had lived together so long they looked and thought alike, they disagreed only on the details of the funeral -- burial or cremation? They compared plays with other plays, never with life, for they sent the second-string reviewers to that; a play was true to 'life' if it conformed to other plays on the same subject. Life, in fact, was a lady in front asked to remove her hat so they could see the play."

Max Jamison, by Wilfrid Sheed (1970; out of print -- direct complaints to Farrar, Straus -- but fairly easy to track down in used-book stores): Speaking of critics, here's a minor miracle: a comic novel about a famously ferocious drama critic for a weekly news magazine who awakes one day to find himself athwart a five-alarm spiritual crisis. ("Closing the Times was the end of his religious observance for the day. He wished real religion wasn't quite so damn impossible. There was a need for it that the Times didn't really fill.") As Sheed proves yet again, there's no Catholic like a lapsed Catholic: Max Jamison's dilemma is made all the more poignant by the author's sneaking suspicion that there's no way out.