Five Best Comic Novels by Roger Kimball

The Wall Street Journal has an Op-Ed online piece by the redoubtable editor of The New Criterion:

1. "Leave It to Psmith" by P.G. Wodehouse (Doran, 1924).

May I begin a survey of superb comic novels by offering the collected works of P.G. Wodehouse--100 volumes, give or take? No? Well, how about "Leave It to Psmith"? Everyone knows about Bertie and Jeeves. Allow me to introduce Rupert Psmith. The "P" is silent, he explains, "as in phthisis, psychic, and ptarmigan." But the comedy is uproarious in this tale of an impecunious though impeccably turned out dandy who impersonates the modern poet Ralston McTodd--a scaly specimen--in order to cadge an invitation to Blandings Castle so that he can pursue the beautiful Eve Halliday. The plot is stuffed with improbable twists, farcical turns, breath-stopping complications and one of the greatest predawn flowerpot-throwing scenes in literature.

2. "Scoop" by Evelyn Waugh (Little, Brown, 1938).

"Scoop" is Waugh's funniest book and the best (and most savage) satire of newspaper journalism in English. William Boot is the retiring author of "Lush Places," a nature column in the Daily Beast, the brash flagship of Lord Copper's gargantuan publishing empire. He is not to be confused with John Courtney Boot, the ambitious novelist eager to get away from London and his girlfriend. A helpful friend, the mesmerizing Mrs. Stitch, invites Lord Copper to a lunch party, wraps him around her little finger and has everyone at the table regale him with the exploits of young Boot, "the Prime Minister's favorite writer." "Get Boot," Lord Copper commands, and his underlings buzz into action, producing the wrong Boot, of course, who is promptly outfitted and sent to the godforsaken African hot spot of Ishmaelia to cover the impending revolution. The rest is farce--or just journalism.

3. "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House" by Eric Hodgins (Simon & Schuster, 1946).

\Perhaps you've seen the movie "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House" (1948), with Myrna Loy and Cary Grant. It's charming, and the scene where Loy instructs the painter about the colors she wants is comic perfection ("match the little rosebud next to the delphinium--not the one near the hollyhock leaf"). But the movie is nothing compared with the novel by Eric Hodgins. If you've ever thought about engaging an architect to fix up that beautifully sited if slightly ramshackle old place you saw in the country one weekend, read this book. You'll laugh till you cry, and you'll think twice about embarking upon an adventure in real estate or house construction.

4. "Lucky Jim" by Kingsley Amis (Doubleday, 1954).

The academic novel has become a subgenre of its own. There are some very good ones, but the best is also one of the first, Kingsley Amis's "Lucky Jim." An instant sensation when it was first published, "Lucky Jim" tells the story of Jim Dixon, an anxious young history don at a small, aggressively undistinguished provincial university. Dixon has just managed to produce--but not yet publish--a scholarly article called "The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485." It was, Dixon thought, "a perfect title, in that it crystallised the article's niggling mindlessness, its funeral parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems." You can see why "Lucky Jim" is, even today, regarded as an important source of information about university culture.

5. "The Belles Lettres Papers" by Charles Simmons (Morrow, 1987).

Ostensibly a history of Belles Lettres, "the most powerful literary magazine in the world," this book is in fact a satire of the passions and personalities of the people who run a famous New York weekly book review. Curious readers might like to know that Charles Simmons was formerly an editor at the New York Times Book Review. One of the best characters is Newbold Press, a ghastly and thuggish philistine who is brought in as editor to clean house. He comes a cropper, but not before entertaining us with a stupendous exhibition of stupidity and bad judgment. My only question is whether this splendid book should be filed under fiction or documentary.

Fiction or documentary is always the key question in our age of folly.