Patterned Patter

UNCLE FRED IN THE SPRINGTIME--P. G. Wodehouse-- Doubleday, Doran ($2).

Unfulfilled ambition of the late, superserious Sir Edward Grey was to write a leader for the London Times Literary Supplement on the works of Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. This summer, bald, easygoing Author Wodehouse received an honorary D. Litt. from Oxford, drew plaudits for his style (TIME, July 10). Though many a lesser humorist has crept up behind the Wodehouse technique, tried to sprinkle salt on its tail, only the Old Master himself can really catch it. He does it by rewriting everything at least three times, concentrating and sharpening his effervescent prolixity. Thus revised, markedly improved since its serialization in the Satevepost last spring, is Uncle Fred in the Springtime.

To Wodehousebroken readers, each of their master's novels is as good as the last, perhaps even a little better. Last week's Wodehouse, both in patter & pattern, they found as engagingly inane as ever. For Uncle Fred in the Springtime has the usual bubbling dialogue, the same jolly old set of characters, the same intricately improbable plot clicking along with the dizzy precision of a circus.

Blandings Castle, the Shropshire seat of pig-mad, sieve-memoried Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, is once more the scene of action, and the threatened abduction of his prize porker, the Empress of Blandings, is again a mainspring of the plot. Before the final exposure, young love is triumphant and the Empress back snuffling in her sty.

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