I had never heard of Wilder until a year or so ago, but I read The Bridge of San Luis Rey toward the end of last year, and now I’ve read this one. I picked it up at a secondhand book stall at our local market a few months ago — at the same time I got Blitzkrieg Bops, actually — and now here we are.

It’s 1926. The twenties are undeniably roaring, for some people at least. The titular Theophilus, or Teddie, as he prefers to be known, starts the story by leaving his job teaching in a boys' school. He goes on the road, buying a car from a friend, and at first you think it’s going to be a pre-Kerouac kind of thing. But within a few paragraphs he’s reached Newport Rhode Island, sold the car, and settled down for the summer.

Well, ‘settled down’ is not quite the right term. In fact, in modern terms, he has to hustle to make a living. Staying at the YMCA at first, he manages to get various jobs teaching kids tennis, tutoring languages, and reading to people. It was long before audiobooks, obviously.

But really, what he’s doing is sorting out relationships. Various kinds of relationships, but not that varied kinds of people. Newport is a summer home for the wealthy, the kind of people familiar from that other book about the twenties. You know, the one I’ve never managed to like. This lot have more problems, and are more interesting, than Gatsby’s crowd. And some of them are kids, too.

He is astonishingly capable, and since the story is told in the first person, it can come across as a tad self-serving, almost boastful at times. But North is so charming, so thoroughly good for people, that it’s hard to criticise.

Oh, I should add, it’s a comedy of sorts. Among a certain class of reader, myself included, mention Rhode Island and you’ll conjure up soul-sucking, squamous, cosmic horror. But there’s nothing even vaguely Lovecraftian here. The only horrors are the fear of social ostracism, and one house that is supposedly haunted. North finds a way to remove that stain from the house and ensure that servants will stay there again.

Oh well.

I enjoyed it a lot, but it’s a strange little one. It does just about dip into hints of magic realism at a couple of points, but those are mainly North (or Wilder) criticising the kind of people who prey on the vulnerable by offering healing and such.

It’s maybe not fair to compare it to The Great Gatsby, just because it’s set around the same time. Fitzgerald was writing about his own time, while Wilder was writing fifty years later, making it just on the border of a historical novel for him (though he lived through the time, so not exactly). But I couldn’t help drawing the comparison, and I enjoyed this much more.