I am out of my depth among Russian were-creatures

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

by Victor Pelevin ***

I have written about post-Soviet magical realism before, and with some trepidation; what does an American who was middle aged when the USSR dissolved in Boris Yeltsin's vodka glass (left) know about post-Soviet culture? So I have no idea whether this is a good book or not; for me, it's like listening to a lecture that is given half in English and half in some unknown language. It may have interesting moments, but the whole won't hang together.

At the surface, the book is about a 2,000-year-old werefox who makes her money turning tricks as a 17-year-old Chinese prostitute. A Hu-Li's tricks, however, are tricks of the mind, pure figments of her clients' imagination from which she derives psychic energy needed to survive. Ideally it works like this: A Hu-Li arrives looking like a demure, underage prostitute. She goes into the bathroom, transforms into a fox, and quickly whammies the client with her tail before he sees her in her fox form.

While the client lives his sex fantasy in a dreamlike state, A Hu-Li reads an improving book by the bedside, keeping an eye on the client, transforming before he wakes up.

Occasionally, however, the client wakes up before A Hu-Li transforms from her werefox state, and the client is so horrified he jumps to his death. After one such accident, A Hu-Li is forced to troll new territory for johns, and that's where she meets Alexander, a menacing officer who's a holdover from the Soviet era's secret police. He's also a werewolf. They find they can psychically and sexually satisfy each other. They even love each other after a fashion, but their politics, values and goals are at odds. They are, of course, the yin and yang of Russia itself. A Hu-Li is ancient, Asian, cerebral. Alexander is younger, European, materialistic, boorish, even. Their doomed love affair and A Hu-Li's eventual "moving on" to a new state of existence may say something about the imbalance Pelevin sees in the new Russia, but this is just my guess.

More interesting are A Hu-Li's frequent observations about Russia:

Russia is a communal country, and when the Christian peasant commune was destroyed, the criminal commune became the source of the people's morality. The proprieties of the underworld occupied the place where God used to live--or, to put it more correctly, God Himself was incorporated into the notional rules as a top c rominal authority. And when the final religious prosthesis, the Sovieit "internal Party committee" was dismantled,  chap guitar tuned for prison songs set the musical range of the Russian soul.

Pelevin's book has a kind of dark humor and makes lots of allusions to popular culture,which A Hu-Li has observed in her dispassionate werefox way. But there is a sadness and sense of loss. Take A Hu-Li's riff on the Russian version of Cinderella, in which Khavroshka is helped by a brindled cow instead of a fairy godmother. When the cow is slaughtered, an apple tree with golden fruit and leaves grows from them, which makes Khavroshka's fortune:

The fairy tale contained a strange truth about the very saddest and most mysterious side of Russian life. How many times that brindled cow had been slaughtered. And how many times it had returned, either as a magic apple tree or an entire cherry orchard. Only where had all the apples gone? You couldn't find them anywhere. Except maybe by calling the office of United Fruit. But no, that was nonsense. "United Fruit" was the last century, but now any call would get lost in the wires on its way to some company in Gibralter that belonged to a firm from the Falklan d Islands that was managed by a lawyer in Amsterdam in the interests of a trust with an unnamed beneficiary owner.

Ultimately, Pelevin's book seems to ponder a culture whose memory of Old Russia is fading as it still defines itself by--in some way even yearns for--the now-gone Soviet era. How (or whether) Russia can rebuild itself, or whether it has run out of "apples" is the question. Liesl Schillinger's interesting feature on author Pelevin from the "New York Times" is worth a read for more info.

I become embroiled in a mystery in Geneva

Mystery at Geneva***
by Dame Rose Macauley

It's hard to say exactly why this novella is so charming, but it has a lot of it has to do with Dame Rose Macauley's breezy style and absurdist take on global politics between the World Wars--politics that are surprisingly (and sadly) still current.

My guess, having listened to the novel in audio format, is that reading the story aloud also makes Macauley's voice "pop" more than it might if it were read silently.

The novel follows Henry Beechtree, a reporter for the London Bolshevist, who investigates the gradual disappearance of a large number of delegates to the League of Nations in Geneva, the most dysfunctional international body ever depicted in literature, I think.

It all seems straightforward cloak-and-dagger stuff, but Henry is not who he appears to be--and neither is anyone else.

Comparing Macauley with Muriel Spark is tempting, but Dame Rose is a little less likely to hit an artery than Dame Muriel.

I find dashed hopes in a writing class

The Writing Class**
Jincy Willlett

A cynical, aging creative writing teacher pushing 60? Right up my alley, I thought.

After a good first chapter or two, this books descends into an exploration of the teacher's hidden isolation and grief, and her finding friends in the losers in her writing class, who get bumped off one by one.

I didn't figure out who the killer was until the end, but, then, when I found out, I didn't care.

I suffer through a Regency magical mystery tour

Shades of Milk and Honey **
by Mary Robinette

Regency ladies manipulate glamours (think pliant threads of ectoplasm from some unseen netherworld) to beautify their homes. Plain but plucky Jane, a talented amateur in the art or glamourizing, solves a mystery and finds romance. Notable only for the magical realism elements. As Austeniana, pretty terrible.

I finally finish Mr. Peltier's tenth grading reading assignment

The Scarlet Letter **
by Nathaniel Hawthorne

I was assigned to read "The Scarlet Letter," and I just now finished it, 42 years late. While I realize this is a Great Classic with Big Themes (nature of sin, redemption, collusion with evil, etc.), this book hasn't improved with age, experience, or an M.A. in literature. I don't know if Mr. Peltier will still accept my paper (or if he's even still alive), but FWIW:

Why I Hate The Scarlet Letter

By Jean

Chapter 1, The Custom House. I realize this is a kind of "stage setting," meant to give Important Context and all, but does it have to go on and on like that? If you are assigned to read this book for a class, skip it and read it AFTER the rest of the novel. Otherwise, you'll end up procrastinating this assignment for four decades like I did.

Archaic language. Hawthorne didn't use all these "betwixts," "prithees," and "perchances" when he talked to his friends. It seems fake. It IS fake, though maybe Hawthorne thought it was quaint. But it makes the characters seem distant and irrelevant.

Pearl. Did Hawthorne actually know any three-year-old children? They are not fey and intuitive. They poop their pants, pitch fits, and break stuff.

The scarlet letter. There is so much touching and fondling and reference to the scarlet letter that I felt Hawthorne should have been turned into some committee for the abuse of a perfectly good literary symbol.

That's all the time I'm taking in this life on this book.

I make a Dante-esque visit to Florida

Swamplandia! ****
by Karen Russell

The Bigtree family lives on a swampy Florida island where they've run an old-school roadside attraction called Swamplandia! for three generations. A lot of what we find in Swamplandia! is fake. The first Bigtree was Ernest Shedrach, an Ohio miner who was suckered into buying the proverbial Florida swampland in the 1930s. Ernest, who later transformed himself into a fake Indian, Sawtooth Bigtree, made a going concern of Swamplandia! The place features cheap beer and ice cream, and a Bigtree museum of fake artifacts whose backstories change frequently at the whim of the Chief, Sawtooth's son. But the alligator wrestling is real, and so is the big nightly attraction in which Hilola Bigtree, matriarch, climbs a diving board and jumps into a pool of 70 gators and swims across without a scratch. Swamplandia! is a strange version of Paradise, but it is full of innocence and lack of worldly knowledge, at least for the three youngest Bigtrees, Chief and Hilola's children.


Here's a description from Ava, the youngest Bigtree and sometime narrator of the novel:

On Live Chicken Thursdays, a very popular and macabre attraction, the [alligators] jumped five feet out of the Pit to snatch the cloud-white hens suspended above them, tied by their talons to a clothesline. The [alligators] drowned and ate these chickens in an underwater cyclone called the Death Roll while tourists snapped photographs. ... I think my family traumatized generations of children and old women. And we girls must have inherited our forebears' immunity to gore, because Ossie and I could eat PB&J sandwiches during a Death Roll, no problemo.

Swamplandia! is not "the lion shall lie down with the lamb" variety of Paradise, but, given what's to come, it's a regular Eden until forces conspire to separate the family, who each take their solitary journeys to Hell, and from whence they end up in what I suppose you could call Purgatory, if you wanted to strain the analogy. In any case, it's clear that Paradise cannot be regained.

These journeys to hell and back take place in real physical landscapes. Brother Kiwi goes to work in a mainland attraction called, somewhat heavy-handedly, the World of Darkness; sister Osceola finds a spiritist manual and begins to hear ghost voices and runs off with a spirit lover wonderfully named Louis Thanksgiving, sister Ava in pursuit with a mysterious bird man. Grandpa Sawtooth is locked in a nursing home for biting a Swamplandia! customer. The Chief is also living in his own hell on the mainland, his whereabouts unknown to the kids.

But the journeys in the book are also interior. The three young Bigtrees are restive teenagers, and what teenager is satisfied with anything, even the relative paradise of Swamplandia!? There's a lot of growing up, but it's not all heart-warming. The hellish landscapes do a wonderful job mirroring the harrowing time that is adolescence. Most of it is scary as, well, hell, and therein lies a good deal of the charm and truth in the book.

Another point in the book's favor is Russell's lush style and imagery. It isn't magical realism, as it seems at first, but rather is so bedecked with symbols that conjure up echoes of primal themes of Western literature in fresh ways that the novel becomes a kind of treatise on notions of good and evil, sin and redemption, grace and the dark night of the soul. The beauty is, you don't have to know any of that to know that "Swamplandia!" is just a hell of a good book.

I read another Gaskell

"Sylvia's Lovers" ***1/2
by Elizabeth Gaskell

Country beauty settles for dull shopkeeper when her jolly sailor is hustled into the Royal Navy by a press gang during the Napoleonic wars. Heartache ensues. Invites comparisons with Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles." Interesting, but not always successful social criticism by author Gaskell, a Unitarian. Ending is rather abrupt.

I'm discussing the novel over on LibraryThing.com. Feel free to stop by.

Previously read Gaskell's "North and South."

I plumb the subtleties of Henry James

The Golden Bowl ****
by Henry James

I figured  wasn't old enough to read "The Golden Bowl" until this year (and here it is the eve of my 57th birthday). The novel is considered by many to be Henry James' masterwork, and certainly its ever-changing points of view and revelations are almost excruciatingly subtle. I'm pretty sure that I would have to read the book several times to get all its delicate little nuances, which are pretty much why people love James or find him tiresome beyond endurance.

The set up is simple: American widower and millionaire Adam Verver and his grown daughter and only heiress, Maggie, marry, respectively, a brilliant American adventuress and an impoverished Italian prince. Unknown to the Ververs, Charlotte, the adventuress and the Prince, were lovers before their marriages, and the fact that father and daughter seem to be somewhat oblivious allows the lovers to take up their affair again.

***SPOILERS*** Eventually Maggie suspects an affair, showing she has some hidden depths. However, in order to spare her father's happiness, her confrontation of the lovers cannot be made directly. So, for hundreds of pages, we watch as an elaborate game of strategy plays out in which none of the players is completely sure of what the other players know.

It is also unclear who is being victimized and who is doing the victimizing. At first, the Ververs seem to be the dupes of Charlotte and the Prince. But as the story unfolds, the Prince and Charlotte seem to be viewed by the Ververs as errant pets, purchased like the baubles the millionaire collects for his museum back in America City--and to keep off more vulgar and predatory gold-diggers. There is also something unnatural, about Maggie's emotional attachment to her father, whom she esteems more than and certainly spends more time with than the Prince.

The book is claustrophobic in its analogies of silken leashes, gilded cages and circumscribed rooms as the affair between Charlotte and the Prince strains family ties, but also drags people closer together in webs of complicity.

I was struck by the relatively minor character, Fanny Assingham (could James NOT have been aware of the hideous associations in such a name?). She is a friend of the major characters and has something to do with introducing them to each other and setting events in motion--though to a lesser extent than she would wish. She is nothing so much as an officious Polonius figure who spends hours telling her husband, Colonel Bob, how magnificently or beautifully--two adjectives that occur frequently and with many shadings--various characters, including herself, will be in the face of various circumstances, though it's clear her interest in the lives of her friends is largely of a prurient nature.

Bob listens idly, chain smokes and helpfully asks Fanny the same questions that occur to the reader. One senses Bob has everybody's number well before anyone else does and would rather be playing bridge or having a snort at his club.

I liked him the best.

I learn that Henry James is funny

"The Aspern Papers" *****

by Henry James

One of my favorite novels is "The Portrait of a Lady" by Henry James. In fact, I've never really read anything by James I didn't like. "The Aspern Papers" is no exception--except I didn't read it, I heard it.

My first audio book!

"The Aspern Papers" is a mordantly funny story (there's James looking like Uncle Fester from the Addams Family, upper left) of a publisher who hatches what he thinks is a terribly clever plan to determine if the ancient lover of a minor fictional poet, Jeffrey Aspern, has any of the poet's yet-unseen papers he can inveigle out of her.

The publisher worms his way into Miss Bordereau's house, which happens to be in Venice, on the pretext of loving her garden--which he then has to take on the expense of renovating in order to maintain his fiction. He sends Miss B. and her odd niece, Miss Tina, flowers, thinking they will be so grateful they'll befriend him and fork over the papers.

But Miss B., though she must be 90, knows what she is about. She charges him exorbitant rent. She dangles Aspern artifacts in front of him. She nearly drives him to madness and crime.

In the end, the Aspern papers are within the hapless narrator's grasp, but at such a price he simply cannot pay it.

What makes the wicked humor in this book pop is the fact that the reader navigates those Jamesian sentences with their piled on clauses and asides for you so that you don't have to read aloud to yourself, which is always a problem for me because I find myself taking on some kind of accent, usually Welsh or various English dialects (depending on the book) or Southern. Or lip read and look like some hick.

The story was adapted as a movie. Click on James' photo to read more about it.

I find T.C. Boyle less than thrilling

The Women **1/2
by T.C. Boyle

T.C. Boyle is better when he's writing straight fiction than biographical fiction. Compare, for example, the mesmerizingly wonderful "Drop City" to the mesmerizingly dreadful "The Inner Circle," a repugnant and splenetic look at the work of sex research meister Alfred Kinsey.

Boyle seems to enjoy writing about famous people with whom he has some sort of ax to grind--Kinsey, Kellogg-- and so it goes with"The Women," billed as a biography of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, but, in reality, is a biography of the four women in his life. Wright himself is almost absent from this treatment. I learned, for example, that Wright he liked to use soft pencils, eat plain food, had a domineering mother, and had a sense of entitlement such that he rarely paid his bills. In short, Boyle dismisses Wright as an an arrogant mama's boy, an essentially small-town guy with pretensions about his Welsh heritage (an interesting treatment from an author from a small town who changed his own middle name from plain old "John" to "Coraghessan" when he was 17).

The frame for the story is klunky and somewhat incredible; the narrator is a Japanese protege of Wright's, now an architect in his own right, writing a biography with footnotes from the memories of a colleague who worked at Taliesen with him. Fine, as far as it goes, but the point of view of the story is largely omniscient, and it seems unlikely that either the protege or his colleague would have such intimate knowledge of the inner thoughts of Wright's household members.

*** SPOILER*** The plotting of the story is equally klunky; it's told in reverse chronological order. In theory that makes sense because it allows events to lead back to the murder of Wright's lover, Mamah Cheney, and the burning of Taliesen I by a crazy butler, the most dramatic event in the book. But in telling the story backward, Boyle has to give away a good deal of what's about to happen.

Still, this is Boyle, whose passion and fluidity of language can make up for a lot of other drawbacks. One only wonders why he squandered the chance to "Kellog-ify" Wright and opted instead to write about the women.

I'm reading too fast!

Quick updates on books recently devoured in a short period of time.

"All the King's Men" by Robert Penn Warren****
Ostensibly a political study based on the life of Huey Long, but with a big dose of Southern gothic thrown in. Prose so rich it's almost drug-like. Highly recommend the movie version with Sean Penn whose perfomance as Willie/Huey is riveting. Click pic above for clip of Willie's stump speech (and, yes, that's James Gandolfini who falls in the hog pen). The "ain't nobody ever helped a hick but a hick hisself" speech makes the hairs stand up on your neck.

"Borstal Boy" by Brendan Behan ***
Behan's memoir about being in a juvenile farm prison at age 16 for plotting to blow up some ships in Liverpool on behalf of the IRA. Despite Behan's swagger and resentment he offers charming accounts of being sucked into "Cranford" by Mrs. Gaskell, provided by the borstal's lending library, and offers unsentimental but humane observations about his fellow inmates from across Britain.

"The Witches of Eastwick"*** and "The Widows of Eastwick"** by John Updike
Despite it's fake feminist overlay, "Witches" is a fascinating examination of the devil in the person of the ill-made Darryl Van Horne, who is a kind of anti-creator. "Widows" is an extremely weak sequel in which the witches attempt to rectify things that happened in the first book, but ultimately it's more travelogue with a some spells thrown in than anything particularly interesting or insightful.

"Cotton Comes to Harlem" by Chester Himes**1/2Short, spare noir crime pulp with lots of spice.

"Mockingjay" by Suzanne Collins**
Final book in the Hunger Games trilogy. Initial juvenile dystopian had lot of interesting things to say about power, public relations, and image making, that devolved into a one-trick pony in the second installment, "Catching Fire." Sadly, the third book doesn't redeem the series. Collins seems unable to develop her characters so opts for torturing them in ever more inventive gladiatorial arenas. All that will provide jobs and fun for the Hollywood geeks who do special effects for the movies (which is where this story is ultimately headed). But there's just not much meat there when all's said and done.

"My Name is Number 4" by Ting-xing Ye***
Straightforward memoir about growing up in the chaos of China's Cultural Revolution. Ting-xing Ye's father was a factory owner before the Revolution, which put her family in a suspect position with the Communist Party. She was eventually forced to leave school to work on a cooperative farm where various political factions vied for power and played head games with the workers. The narrative is so detached that it seems dead in places--it's certainly no "Diary of Anne Frank"--but an interesting personal look at a strange and terrible historical event.

I spend time in bleak landscapes

"Meeks" by Julia Holmes
"2017" by Olga Slavnikova

See reviews of these two modern dystopian novels in the latest issue of Belletrista.com.

I hear Harpo speak!

"Harpo Speaks!" ***1/2
by Harpo Marx
I've always had a soft spot for anarchists, and "Harpo Speaks!" reveals the real-life Harpo Marx as the man I always imagined him to be--full of kindliness, decency, and canny intelligence.

Harpo's autobiography overlooks a lot--the perfidy of his brother Chico; his brother Groucho's bouts with depression; his obsessive stage mother, Minnie; and the tyranny of his dearest friend, Alexander Woolcott. But, then, you'd expect someone who viewed life as a kind of surreal joke (Harpo even had his picture drawn by the surrealist Salvador Dali, at left; click to read a Telegraph story about the pair's friendship) to be able to overlook a lot.

There are also gaps in the story. During World War I, Minnie kept the boys out of the draft by buying a chicken farm in Illinois because farmers were exempt. Harpo changed his name from Adolph to Arthur in the wake of anti-German sentiment during the wars. Although he was a secular Jew (and raised his four adopted children as Roman Catholics, his wife's faith), Harpo felt a deep affinity for the plight of Jews in Germany, whence his family had emigrated.

And the book completely ignores Harpo's and Groucho's longtime friendship with President Harry Truman. Truman had been a fan of the Marx Brothers, whom he'd seen on stage as a young man about 1910 in Kansas City. Both Harpo and Groucho seem to have lobbied Truman to allow more German and Austrian Jews into the country after World War II, urged him to run again in 1952, and Harpo sent Truman a photo of the Harry Truman Forest from Israel. (Truman was honored for being among the first to recognize the state of Israel.)

Most importantly, the book overlooks just how damn hard the Marx Brothers worked. Harpo mentions movie-making and the comedy schticks he and his brothers developed in the early vaudeville days mostly in passing. His book includes a funny story about doing gymnastics with Marion Davies at San Simeon. (He mentions casually that the Marx Brothers did all their own stunts, but forgets to mention that he and his brothers were well into their 40s at the time).

Harpo talks more about his love of music, his devotion to the harp, his beloved wife and kids, and his friends than show biz or his brothers. He seems happily bewildered by the fact that a boy who was thrown out of school (literally, froma first-storey window, by Irish hooligans) in the second grade was beloved by so many smart and influential people. He chalks it up to his being a good listener: "What could I possibly say to interest them?"

In "Harpo Speaks!" quite a lot, as it turns out.

I read a cautionary tale about social media

@expectations

by Kit Reed ***

Given that social networking has burgeoned in the 10 years since Kit Reed wrote "@expectations," her cautionary tale about the dangers of virtual life is still surprisingly fresh and relevant.

Unlike the movie "Avatar," in which it's a GOOD thing when the main character morphs into his virtual self at last, "@expectations" explores the down side of virtual identity.

*** SPOILERS *** Readers will probably be able to suss out the virtual angle of the novel, which might have been a little harder to discern 10 years ago. But they might also be able to read about poor Jenny Wilder (a psychotherapist, ironically enough), who's having a virtual affair on a social networking site, with considerably more chagrin.

If you have access to a teenager's page on Facebook, you'll see that the kiddies are all over this, reinventing themselves sometimes daily with new pictures, often heavily Photoshopped, cool new names, and conversations in which they try out new double entendres and hip language. Meet them in real life, and they're still the scrawny or pudgy kids you see hiding zits behind their hair and trying to blend into the background in real life.

But FaceBook isn't just for kids anymore. Studies show that 50-year-old women are the fastest growing segment of the network. Most of my friends seem to be using FB as a kind of virtual "Grandma's Brag Book" or, worse, for inspirational riffs ripped off from the "Eat Pray Love."

How many of them might also have avatars other than their real gramma selves, I don't want to know. It would be too sad, though I can't say I wouldn't understand. Who among us wouldn't like to cast off the aging carapace occasionally and replace it with a cute 30-something self but with all the savvy and sass we've got at 50-something? It's possible through social networks, and some of the characters in "@expectations" do just that.

OK, Reed's novel might be a little TOO cautionary--there's a tittle too much melodrama for my taste--but it does force you to look at whether social networking is really all that harmless or therapeutic. There are some pretty twisted people, and Vinnie the ex-con (Azeath the super hero in virtual life) isn't the most twisted. In fact, the thread of his story is so predictable as to be banal, perhaps purposely so. Nope, it's the seemingly "normal" people who seem to get the most twisted up in virtual reality, twisted up so tight that they can scarcely function off line.

You probably know people like this. Even if you don't know you know them. Reed treats them pretty kindly and allows one or two of them to untwist in an ending that is both appealing and and surprising.

Click the pic to hear "Avatar" director James Cameron talk about "the uncanny valid," the point at which his half-animated, half-human characters become sympathetic characters. Maybe there's a counterpart to the "uncanny valid" on social networks?

I visit the original upper class twit

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves ***

by P.G. Wodehouse

My first reading of Wodehouse was just a little spoiled from having seen most of the funny bits from "Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves" in the wonderful Hugh Laurie-Stephen Fry "Jeeves and Wooster" series on BBC TV (left). In fact, the two work so well as the idiot Bertie and his sanguine valet cum keeper, that it's hard not to hear their voices while reading.

In this installment, a relatively late one from 1963, Bertie purchases an Alpine hat with a pink feather of which Jeeves deeply disapproves. Needless to say, the hat will go. But exactly how and in the course of what near-miss matrimonial scrape Jeeves will coerce Bertie to be rid of said h., as Bertie might say, is Wodehouse's genius. Nothing is ever straightforward. Everything is trivial, which, of course, is why it's funny. Take, for instance, Bertie's "oiling out" of the dreaded Totleigh school treat (picnic):

Apart from anything else, I was remembering the story I had heard Pongo Twistleton tell one night at the Drones, illustrative of how unbridled passions are apt to become at these binges. Pongo got mixed up once in a school treat down in Somersetshire, and his description of how in order to promote a game called "Is Mr. Smith at Home?" he had to put his head in a sack and allow the younger generation to prod him with sticks had held the smoking room spellbound. At a place like Totleigh, where even on normal days human life was not safe, still worse excesses were to be expected. The glimpse or two I had had of the local Dead End kids had told me how tough a bunch they were and how sedulously they should be advoided by the man who knew what was good for him.

Much has been made of Wodehouse's pitch-perfect style in writing in Bertie's voice and about Britain in the years between the Wars. No one but Jane Austen did that kind of social satire quite as well.

I'm sure many tiresomely predictable diatribes have been written by critics about the subliminal homoeroticism in the Jeeves-Wooster relationship. I see nothing so innocent. In my estimation, Jeeves devotes most of his time to prevent Bertie's marrying anyone and thus inflicting more idiot upper class twits on the nation and weakening its gene pool. Jeeves does this so delicately, pampering Bertie's taste for liquor and comfort, that his victim never quite realizes he has become something of an overbred pet doted on by an owner that sees neutering as the only kind thing to do.

Here's Jeeves helping Bertie out singing "Minnie the Moocher" from the TV series. And, of course, if you're unfamiliar with the whole concept of the upper class twit, here's Monty Python to explain.