P.G. Wodehouse and Joyce Carol Oates

The last couple days I have been thinking about this: Whatever I happen to be reading tends to seep into my thoughts throughout the day, even affecting how I happen to perceive the world. This makes sense to me. So two weeks ago, was I depressed because I was reading Carson McCullers? Or did McCullers appeal to be because I was depressed? I guess it's like the "chicken or the egg." I don't know what the answer is.

So now I'm trying to somehow balance out my reading. You know, something morbid or sad set off by something comic or heroic. So I'm alternatinge between P.G. Wodehouse's short stories (you know, of Jeeves and Wooster fame) and Oates's We Were the Mulvaneys.

Wodehouse is funny, very funny. And really, I'd said he writes exceptionally well. Something about the cadences of speech strike me as funny (satire, I guess) because the are authentic somehow. Plus, Wodehouse appeals to my interest in cultural Englishness, especially between the World Wars. I'll spare all of you my adademic rant about that. But it's a topic--English cultural identity in the 20th century--that interests me, as some of you know.

And then there's Oates. I read Expensive People, my first Oates novel a couple of weeks ago. Like the Mulvaneys, it is written in the first person, and in both novels Oates seems a master of the first-person narrative. And let's just be honest--I like the gothic elements. Oates, in a way very different from Wodehouse, is a prose stylist. She's amazing.

But aren't they an odd contrast? And why am I reading them together? And what does it say about my psychological state? I think as much as anything, it says that over my break, I am wanting to read literature different from what I read during the semester. As much as I love the material I teach, there's more to life than adolescent lit.

Drennan, Resident Literary Critic and Introvert