In a Word, Wodehouse

Imagine master and man—loveable goof and discreet, benevolent genius—the English Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (sort of)—at a 1930s weekend house-party, rife with deception, romance, petty crimes and other shenanigans. This set-up fuels 11 novels and dozens of short stories—starring, of course, Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, and penned by P. G. Wodehouse.

After going on a bit too long last week about Saturday Evening Post serials, and resolving thereafter to limit my posts to 500 words, I knew I was in trouble when I saw this morning that one of the best novels serialized in the Post in the 1930s, The Code of the Woosters, and four other Jeeves volumes, were appearing today as ebooks from Norton, Wodehouse’s new U.S. paperback publisher.

Wodehouse has long been one of my favorites, one of the ‘26’. (He’s also the only purely comic writer on the list.) But,  except for public-domain works, there was no Wodehouse available in ebook format in the U.S. until today. I suspect that many readers under 35 don’t know much about Wodehouse, and I’m not sure how to appeal to older readers who know the name but have never been bitten by the bug. Besides, what can I say about such a monumental figure (author of almost a hundred books written over the course of 70+ years) in 500 words?

I’ve decided to duck my responsibilities a bit (if that sounds like Bertie, it’s intentional) and refer you to two authorities on Wodehouse: Richard Usborne (his Plum Sauce is a useful guide for committed fans; earlier versions with different titles will do almost as well) and Anthony Lane (whose 2004 article in The New Yorker is written from the viewpoint of an enthusiast but handles the thorniest issues with courage and intelligence).

What can I tell you, though, about Wodehouse, that almost no one else would?

First, no matter how much praise Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie deserve for their performances in Jeeves and Wooster on 1990s television, Wodehouse is best experienced on the printed—or virtual—page. If you know master and man only from TV (or audiobooks), there are greater pleasures in store when you read Wodehouse for yourself. Let’s just say there’s a layer of freshness and innocence, of Woosterian naiveté, in the mostly first-person narrative, that gets pulled away too quickly when someone else is interpreting it for you. (Furthermore, I'd recommend the Jeeves novels over the short stories: it's more amazing to watch Wodehouse juggle more balls for a longer time. After Code of the Woosters, try Joy in the Morning.)

Second, keep an eye on Bertie’s aunts. There’s a mystical secret about them, and, once you discover it for yourself, you’ll have yet another reason to read every last word of the series (ending with Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen) to confirm your hypothesis.

One last remark: when you’ve inhaled all of Jeeves and Wooster, there are arguably even greater Wodehouse comedies ahead. Keyword: Blandings.

Devour Your Serial

I’m going to try to make today’s post a simple love letter to serial fiction... or a confession to a mild readerly addiction from which it turns out I never fully recovered... a safe, easy reminiscence (no analysis, please) about bits of my childhood reading and what came along a few days ago to stir up those memories and reawaken some old passions.

Today, I won’t do the (general) history of serial fiction (whether you start with Scheherazade or Eugène Sue, the usual suspects down the road are Balzac, Dumas, Dickens, Wilkie Collins... on to All Quiet on the Western Front and beyond). And I won’t get to riffs on the relationship between serials and the sexual (postponement and anticipation as ploys of the story-teller as seducer; life and death as the stakes of narrative; seriality, transference and desire; serial horror in Sade...).

Instead, something more personal.

I grew up in a world in which not just magazine fiction (remember that?) but magazine and newspaper serials seemed to be everywhere. I can’t remember a time when my father wasn’t following multiple serials in The Saturday Evening Post (there were always two running concurrently, staggered so they never ended with the same issue), and from the time I was nine I followed his example. When I wasn’t reading the Perry Mason backlist in 25-cent paperbacks, I was reading, for example, the new Mason in the Post, serialized over the course of eight weeks just before it was to appear in hardback. Of course, it wasn’t just Erle Stanley Gardner (of the others, I remember most vividly Alistair MacLean’s Guns of Navarone and Hammond Innes’ Wreck of the Mary Deare, but there were also books from John P. Marquand’s Mr. Moto, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe and C. S. Forester’s Hornblower series, as well as the occasional Western [ADDED 18 JULY 2011: and my first sci-fi novel, John Christopher's stunning No Blade of Grass, a/k/a The Death of Grass]), and it wasn’t just The Saturday Evening Post or just magazines: I read a string of Agatha Christie (mostly Jane Marple) novels as serials, in newspapers (starting with the novel now known as The 4.50 from Paddington, in the national ‘Sunday’ edition of the New York Daily News, and ending with A Caribbean Mystery in The Houston Post) and at least one in a magazine (a walk on the wild side: Cat among the Pigeons in my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal; technically not a serial, since the entire novel appeared, lightly condensed, in a single issue). Other newspaper serials I read ranged from nonfiction (Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring) to two of the lesser James Bond novels. I won’t include John D. Macdonald novels condensed in single issues of Cosmopolitan (yes, Cosmopolitan: before Helen Gurley Brown arrived, every issue contained a novel, and the magazine tried to appeal to both women and men) or the ‘nonfiction novels’ originally fostered in the pages of The New Yorker and Esquire.

At some point it all tapered off: all I remember of serialized fiction in the 1970s were Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet in The Atlantic and Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer in The New Yorker. And in the following decades I somehow missed most of The Bonfire of the Vanities and Harlot’s Ghost when they were serialized in Rolling Stone.

By that time, or so I thought, serialized fiction had become largely the stuff of nostalgia. With The Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolfe was explicitly seeking to return to the model of Dickens. And Stephen King’s The Green Mile (first published in 1996 in six monthly paperback instalments) was also conceived as a return to Dickens and was the work of a writer with strong childhood memories of serials in The Saturday Evening Post.

Nostalgia or not, the first appearance of The Green Mile struck a chord with me. I remember devouring it as it appeared; if I was on the road, I calculated where I could snap up each instalment the day it came out. I even had fantasies that the huge success of The Green Mile might lead to a return of serialization on a larger scale.

Fifteen years went by, the way years do, and, if we make an exception for the enormous impact of the Harry Potter novels (it’s not always clear what counts as serial fiction and what doesn’t, but hundreds of thousands of readers lined up outside bookstores awaiting the release of the next Potter, feels to me a lot like U.S. readers lining the docks, impatient to learn whether Little Nell lives or dies), the next blip on my radar was a double one, and it came last week.

First, the new Paris Review arrived, containing the second of four parts of the magazine’s serialization of Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous novel The Third Reich. (Bolaño deserves multiple posts all to himself, presumably outside the context of serial fiction. And the same for The Paris Review. What might surprise you about the latter, if you don’t know already, is that it’s not a ‘duty read’. It's also available on your iPad.)

Second, I came under the spell (after 50 years of our passing like [space-]ships in the night) of the German sci-fi serial phenomenon Perry Rhodan. English speakers who don’t follow science fiction are unlikely to have heard of Perry Rhodan (of the 2600 weekly numbers of the series, which appears initially in pulp-booklet format every Friday in German, only a limited number have been translated into English, and none currently)—but the cumulative international sales of the series (which breaks down into cycles or story arcs of 25 to 100 numbers, each number running in the neighborhood of 25,000 words and selling for the equivalent of a few dollars) run close to one and a half billion copies.

Yes, it’s another space opera; yes, it’s (now) set thousands of years in the future; yes, it’s a bit like joining a TV soap or any other series in midstream; yes, it draws on principles of physics that were not imparted to school children in, say, my Perry Mason days. But it’s all coming out in ebook format, last Friday’s release (Das Thanatos-Programm, number 2600, the beginning of a new cycle) was free and the easiest iBooks download ever, future instalments will go for $1.99 in the U.S....

...and it’s an honest-to-God serial!!!

To be continued.

Making Changes: On Deodorant, Cola and Ebook Prices

We’re not surprised when writers of all sorts talk, and write, about politics, money, alcohol, love, sex or, in my case, about coffee. I feel the need, though, to ask your indulgence before I go on about... deodorant.

Deodorant formulations and formats seem to have nothing to do with ebooks, but there are surprising parallels in the marketplace.

I must first disclose that I’m part of a disgruntled minority of U.S. consumers. We grew up using one formulation and format of underarm deodorant and are frustrated that we are no longer able to buy it. The product in question is Old Spice round stick in the original Old Spice scent. The manufacturer, now Procter & Gamble, has discontinued the product, which had a large following, and now offers only an oval stick labelled ‘original round-stick formula’ but which hordes of consumers, including me, contend does not really smell the same as the discontinued round stick. (Die-hards also prefer the very shape of the round stick: if they wanted a ‘speed’ [i.e., oval] stick [like Mennen], they’d buy one.) The Internet can be an angry place: on some boards my cohorts go so far as to invoke the example of ‘new’ versus ‘classic’ Coca-Cola. Spokespersons for P&G are polite and articulate but have not explained the elimination of the round stick.

Those who post on these boards generally reveal the action they’ve taken in the face of this frustration. Surprisingly often, they’ve done exactly what Procter & Gamble would have them do: buy some other P&G product instead of the product they really want—want so much that they’re posting about their frustration. It would seem more logical—that is, more likely to sway Procter & Gamble to make the desired product available again—to substitute a different manufacturer’s deodorant, or do without deodorant altogether (and inform P&G of the reasons for one’s action); Classic Coke was not restored without a struggle.

Readers of ebooks seem to me every bit as displeased about changes in ebook prices that began last year. Until then, the norm in the U.S. had been one established by Amazon when it introduced the original Kindle in 2007: with very few exceptions, when a book appeared in hardback, the corresponding ebook cost US $9.99 (or less) at Amazon, even if the publisher had assigned the ebook a higher list price; books available in trade paperback sold typically for $7.99 as ebooks, others for even less. But all that changed with the advent of Apple’s iPad and iBooks. Apple was not willing to compete with Amazon’s aggressive discounting and entered into ‘agency model’ pricing agreements with (five, then all six, of) the largest publishing conglomerates: the publishers would have access to the huge customer base correctly anticipated for the iPad, and in return the publishers would assure that uniform prices, set by the publisher, were imposed on all U.S. ebook retailers (now understood to be ‘agents’ of the major publishers) and their customers. Today, if a book is on the New York Times hardback bestseller list, the corresponding ebook typically costs $12.99. But the ebook of Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants has been priced at $19.99 since it appeared last September; that ebook price will fall by only one dollar when the book appears in paperback in August. And the next Stephen King will cost $16.99 in eformat when it’s released in November.

The debate over whether the new prices are justifiable is complicated, and I make no pretense of exploring it today. But I believe that not only readers but also authors—and perhaps even publishers and estores—would be better served by much lower prices. (These matters are frequently discussed on the blogs listed in the column to the right.) Many readers object to higher ebook prices, including hundreds of visitors to Amazon’s product pages who not only tag an ebook as overpriced but also give it a one-star (i.e., the lowest possible) rating (with explanation) if they believe the publisher is engaging in price-gouging. Some decry this (one-star) practice, but as far as I can tell it does work initially as intended: the resultant lowered average rating (shared by print and electronic formats) spells lower-than-expected sales.

It seems obvious to me that readers who are unhappy with the price of an ebook should not buy it. Paying $12.99 or $16.99 or more for an ordinary ebook, is voting for continued pricing in that range. And so-called ebook ‘piracy’ is not the only alternative. Prices generally come down in time; rare is the book that must be read immediately; and public libraries and estore-based lending systems are becoming more and more viable sources for ebooks. And don’t forget the hundreds of thousands of ebooks available for $9.99, or $2.99, or $0.99, or free of charge, from any ebook store. It’s your wallet. How will you vote with it?

And how will I vote—not as a reader, today, but as a blogger who profits when a reader clicks on a link and makes a purchase?

I already have voted: last month I silently removed from this blog the last display ad for an ebook priced in the ‘gouge zone’, and I adopted the following policy: no more display advertisements here for ordinary U.S. ebooks priced higher than $9.99. (I reserve judgment on ‘bundled’ ebooks and their equivalent, like Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy or the collected novels of José Saramago, and on ebooks as published overseas, where different market conditions may justify slightly higher prices.) I may mention or discuss in a post an ebook from the gouge zone, and I intend in such cases to continue to provide text links to pages where readers can get more information and decide for themselves whether to buy. The distinction between posts and display ads—I see the former as predominantly altruistic and the latter as predominantly for profit (if not downright venal)—is admittedly slippery. Here, as elsewhere, I welcome feedback.