Psmith Journalist

By: P. G. Wodehouse

Narrated by: Jonathan Cecil

Meet Psmith, with a silent 'P' as in psychic. A gallant, charming individual, Psmith has a gift for getting into awful scrapes, and when he takes over a gentile journal known as Cosy Moments with the aid of Billy Windsor, its sub-editor, he turns it into a radical publication...with alarming and hilarious results.©2014 P.G. Wodehouse (P)2014 Audible, Inc.

Fabulous

Laugh out loud funny although due to it being written in a very different era it is not politically correct, but still not worth missing. A great follow up to In The City by PG as well.

A fun, light story, narration a little problematic

Psmith shines in this story of comic New York criminal shenanigans, effortlessly and suavely sidestepped He's a great character: a funny, brilliant, verbose and kind of ridiculous fellow who courts trouble just for the fun of subverting it--the inverse, if you like, of Bertie Wooster. Psmith Journalist may not be Wodehouse's most fast-moving novel, but it has some wonderful laughs and a lot of action.

Whether the 21st century reader can or should overlook the casual racism of the time (1909), which does make some explicit appearances, is up to the individual, but it's only right to mention it--and the fact that the whole story seems to inhabit a world entirely free of women.

While Jonathan Cecil seems to hit the bullseye with his Old Etonian voice for Psmith, he's less successful with Wodehouse's exaggerated and slang-filled New York street talk. This is unfortunate, because in this novel, Psmith himself is pretty much the only British character. I would happily listen to this narrator in a novel that doesn't call for so many American voices.

Different is good!

Yes, this is Wodehouse’s early work and yes it isn’t as hysterical as some of his later stuff, but as it captures in a sardonic way New York at the turn of last century, it is really great! Definitely not boring.

Remarkable!!!

Here is Wodehouse at his peak power! No such a thing as a bad Wodehouse book! Nevertheless, in all Psmith stories you get, Wodehouse, whole Wodehouse and, nothing less.

Ah Psmith

Psmith is an amiable force of nature wrapping all about him up into his schemes. This is an odd duck in the Psmith cannon with a light social concern for New York tenements paired with antics. Be warned there are some unsavory racial slurs tossed about in the colloquial manner of his day and locale.