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A review by millennial_dandy
The Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith
funny
lighthearted
relaxing
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
Such a delightful little book.
This is one of those stories with a breezy lightheartedness to its satire and with that quintessentially dry sense of British humor that won't be for everyone. Indeed, I could see how a person could read this and not understand why anyone would find it funny, and yet I got a few belly laughs out of it.
The Diary of a Nobody is just that: a diary of the daily goings on of an ordinary man. There's no grand character arc, nothing dramatic happens, the little dramas are, for the most part, completely mundane. The fussiness of the protagonist and his fear of ever breaking social rules combined with the sincerity of his otherwise good nature make him incredibly likeable if somewhat neurotic.
We open with a short saga involving his boot scraper which continuously trips everyone who comes to visit and his explanation of how this is embarrassing, but ultimately not his fault. Just like in a real diary, there are many recurring little grievances like this, and we see how, depending on his mood, the protagonist handles them. If he's in good humor, he'll make a little joke that he'll note down as being particularly good. He writes down his anxieties such as not being sure what type of dress would be appropriate for a given social engagement. And he documents the comings and goings of his best friends, Cummings and Going
We meet his family and friends. His wife, for all his little foibles, clearly adores him, and it's really lovely to see that underneath it all they have a very stable, loving relationship. Their son, Lupin, is everything that his father isn't: he's hip to the jive, he's capricious and impulsive, he's in tune with the shifting of the social tides. But he's also very thoughtless and spoiled, superficial, and devil-may-care, and he plainly doesn't value the feelings or wishes of his parents, whose greatest hope is to see him settled into a stable career at his father's office.
There is something a tad curmudgeonly on the part of author George Grossmith about how he typifies the upcoming generation in this way (and they are all typified in this way), and maybe it's just because I'm closer to the 'younger' than the 'older' generations of our current times, but generalizing young people as self-serving, vain, and lazy always strikes me as a smokescreen for envy. Which is ironic, because nothing ages a person more than mocking the slang, interests, and ambitions of people younger than you are.
Nevertheless, 'Diary of a Nobody' is a very fun book to read, and a great option for anyone in a reading slump.
A specific suggestion would be to get a copy with the introduction by Alan Pryce-Jones, who does a stellar job setting the reader up for the novel and writes of it with the same joy and enthusiasm with which Grossmith wrote 'The Diary'. I cannot express it better, so I'll let Alan speak for himself:
This is one of those stories with a breezy lightheartedness to its satire and with that quintessentially dry sense of British humor that won't be for everyone. Indeed, I could see how a person could read this and not understand why anyone would find it funny, and yet I got a few belly laughs out of it.
The Diary of a Nobody is just that: a diary of the daily goings on of an ordinary man. There's no grand character arc, nothing dramatic happens, the little dramas are, for the most part, completely mundane. The fussiness of the protagonist and his fear of ever breaking social rules combined with the sincerity of his otherwise good nature make him incredibly likeable if somewhat neurotic.
We open with a short saga involving his boot scraper which continuously trips everyone who comes to visit and his explanation of how this is embarrassing, but ultimately not his fault. Just like in a real diary, there are many recurring little grievances like this, and we see how, depending on his mood, the protagonist handles them. If he's in good humor, he'll make a little joke that he'll note down as being particularly good. He writes down his anxieties such as not being sure what type of dress would be appropriate for a given social engagement. And he documents the comings and goings of his best friends, Cummings and Going
We meet his family and friends. His wife, for all his little foibles, clearly adores him, and it's really lovely to see that underneath it all they have a very stable, loving relationship. Their son, Lupin, is everything that his father isn't: he's hip to the jive, he's capricious and impulsive, he's in tune with the shifting of the social tides. But he's also very thoughtless and spoiled, superficial, and devil-may-care, and he plainly doesn't value the feelings or wishes of his parents, whose greatest hope is to see him settled into a stable career at his father's office.
There is something a tad curmudgeonly on the part of author George Grossmith about how he typifies the upcoming generation in this way (and they are all typified in this way), and maybe it's just because I'm closer to the 'younger' than the 'older' generations of our current times, but generalizing young people as self-serving, vain, and lazy always strikes me as a smokescreen for envy. Which is ironic, because nothing ages a person more than mocking the slang, interests, and ambitions of people younger than you are.
Nevertheless, 'Diary of a Nobody' is a very fun book to read, and a great option for anyone in a reading slump.
A specific suggestion would be to get a copy with the introduction by Alan Pryce-Jones, who does a stellar job setting the reader up for the novel and writes of it with the same joy and enthusiasm with which Grossmith wrote 'The Diary'. I cannot express it better, so I'll let Alan speak for himself:
It is not easy to define exactly what, in an enduring novel, has given it the quality of endurance. [...] It cannot very well be story-telling or faithfulness to life or the gift of arousing emotion for these qualities too vary from age to age. [...] There are not too many Mr. Pooters about now -- progress and war and rising costs have driven them up in the social scale or out into the provinces. But the basic human quality of the Grossmiths' quiet joke persists even in the modern world. It is clear even when they laughed at their fellow men, the Grossmiths loved them.