How to Be a Hermit, or a Bachelor Keeps House
by Will Cuppy
Blurb:
Humorous memoir by a socially-challenged book reviewer living alone in a shack on an island off Long Island, New York, in the 1920s.
My Reaction:
I had never heard of Will Cuppy until we found him on a list somewhere, recommended to fans of P.G. Wodehouse. We started with The Decline and Fall of Practically Everyone, which we thought was funny in parts, but could have been better. (You really need to know more ancient history than either of us do to get a lot of the jokes.)
I had never heard of Will Cuppy until we found him on a list somewhere, recommended to fans of P.G. Wodehouse. We started with The Decline and Fall of Practically Everyone, which we thought was funny in parts, but could have been better. (You really need to know more ancient history than either of us do to get a lot of the jokes.)
I believe it was in the afterward for The Decline and Fall that we read that Wodehouse himself was a fan of Cuppy—specifically, that he read How to Be a Hermit multiple times a year! I don't know if that's true, but it was a good enough reason to try it ourselves, and I'm glad we did. I found this book much the more entertaining of the two, and while I won't make an annual tradition of reading it, I certainly wouldn't mind returning to it at some point.
If you're a fan of Wodehouse, I do think you might enjoy this—if what you love about Wodehouse is his ability to turn an amusing phrase. If intricate plotting is what you're after, then no, you won't like How to Be a Hermit. It really has no plot. It's just a loosely linked collection of essays about his life as a "hermit" in the 1920s. The majority of the essays relate to food in some way, or that's how it seemed to us as we read our way through them.
I always find it amazing how much the same the human experience remains across time. Admittedly, the 1920s aren't ancient history, but 1929 (when this was published) is nearly a century in the rearview mirror! So many of the things he wrote about here had me nodding along in agreement. There might be some differences (his medical book compared to our "Dr. Google"), but the results are the same (anxiety and convincing yourself that your minor complaint is a symptom of any of a dozen serious diseases).
Because we'd already read a brief outline of Cuppy's life, certain elements of the book took on a darker, more melancholy tone that they otherwise would have had, thanks to an awareness of what lay in his future—but putting that to the side, this was a fun read. I'll be interested to try more of his work!
