Persp. on the Brush

BERTIE WOOSTER SEES IT THROUGH (246 pp.) -- P. G. Wodehouse-- Simon & Schuster ($3.50).

What with ancient institutions tottering on all sides and history breathing down everyone's neck like a rozzer bent on making a pinch, one is tempted to state unequivocally that Bertram Wooster, Esq. is one of the few unchanging figures of the times. Stable is the word that comes to mind. Enduring. The old Grecian marble sort of thing. Still, as Jeeves would say, appearances may be deceptive. For after years of presenting to the world an upper lip not necessarily on the stiff side but always as smooth as a baby's whatever-it-is, Wooster has now grown a mustache. Dashing, don't you know, debonaire--at least in the eyes of the young master himself. But Jeeves, a devotee of the lifted-eyebrow school of acting, lifts his eyebrows like nobody's business. No brush for Bertie about sums up the situation.

Still, while it lasts, the brush starts a fire in a frightfully brainy novel-writing number named Florence Craye and a slow burn in her brawny fiance, G. D'Arcy (Stilton) Cheesewright. The subplots, all highly glutinous (sticky, to lesser men), involve 1) a pawned pearl necklace, 2) the sale by Aunt Dahlia* of a cherished weekly, 3) a blighter who writes poetry designed to produce persp. on any decent citizen's brow. The solutions developed in Jeeves's think-tank may seem a little watery to the highbrow-critic chaps. But looking at the rosier side of the roast beef, Wodehouse is still Wodehouse, and a jolly good thing, too, what?

* The good Wooster aunt, not to be confused with Agatha, the bad aunt, who, as is well known, "kills rats with her teeth."

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