Books: Vo-de-o-Wodehouse

HOT WATER — P. G. Wodehouse — Doubleday, Doran. Like Amos 'n' Andy, Charles Dickens and other classics, Author Pelham Grenville Wodehouse some time ago began to pay the penalty of fame. His patter still amuses but its pattern is growing a thought too familiar. Not that Author Wodehouse never uncorks anything new. Hot Water, his latest offering, shows him a keen student of U. S. vaudeville gags, funny sheets, Walter-Winchellisms. It is a tribute to his skill as a merciless horser of musi-comedy scenes, dialog and situation that he is still able to raise many a horse laugh. Packy, U. S. Adonis, ex-Yale footballer and recent millionaire, has bitten off more than he really wants to chew in getting engaged to a beautiful English bluestocking. Fat, henpecked Mr. Gedge is in an even tougher spot, living in enforced exile from his beloved California, his Shriner tendencies sternly held in check by a wife who intends to make him U. S. Ambassador to France. Europe-junketing Senator Opal, a political Dry with a really horrible temper, who unluckily sent Mrs. Gedge a letter intended for his bootlegger, is to be the blunt, blackmailed instrument of Mrs. Gedge's scheme. "Soup" Slattery, hot on the trail of the Gedge jewels; Jane Opal, who thinks she wants an intellectual beau but really fell for Packy when she saw him play for Yale; the Vicomte de Blissac, continuous sufferer from a most unGallic thirst; all these and others converge into a crowded mesh of funny complications which add up to a standard Wodehouse farce.