Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots & Leaves—a book about punctuation that became a surprise best-seller in Britain—has just been published in the U.S. Here, Truss chooses her favorite comic novels.
Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith (Oxford, $9). The faux-naive narrator is now a very well-established strain of English comic writing, yet the diary of Charles Pooter remains fresh and funny to this day.
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope (Oxford, $9). Studying Barchester Towers before my university entrance exams, I managed not to notice that it’s hilarious. I now regard it as the pinnacle of English comic writing. Published in 1857, the second of the Barsetshire Chronicles, it’s a story of virtue versus ambition, in the context of High Victorian church, politics, and journalism.
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The Trick of It by Michael Frayn (Picador, $12). A highly sophisticated comic novel about an academic who marries the woman novelist whose work he has admired. Once married, he undermines her fatally. A novel about talent, jealousy, and the fatal vulnerability of creative people, it is funny, painful, superb.
The Ascent of Rum Doodle by W.E. Bowman (Pimlico, $14). First published in 1956, this is that rare beast: a mountaineering spoof. The tone is that of Three Men in a Boat; the context is Everest; the punch line is, “We had climbed the wrong mountain.” Team member Tom Burley succumbs to every kind of lassitude imaginable: heat lassitude, valley lassitude, glacier lassitude.
The Compleet Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle (out of print). A one-volume edition of the great Molesworth books of the ’50s. Like Wodehouse, Molesworth uses American slang to fantastic effect. But the best things in Molesworth are the sound effects. Wam Plunk Bish Bash Zunk.
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