Welcome to the Widdicombes’ Pacific Northwest summer manse on picturesque Bainbridge Island. Carol Widdicombe, the mistress of the new home she has christened Willowbrook, has two main hobbies: decorating, and diagnosing her husband Frank’s mental state by doing online research. She’s convinced that he’s depressed. And it’s true that he’s a little bummed out by the cancellation of his annual guys trip to Auvergne, France. “They laughed and sometimes drank too much, said cruel-kind things to one another, and indulged themselves in necessary mental and emotional breakdowns.”

But Frank is essentially irrepressible, the kind of man for whom stasis is anathema. If he’s not destroying his tennis opponents on their private court, he’s cooking up a feast, or composing raunchy, scathing emails to his best friends. Frank and Carol’s twenty-something son, Christopher, mopes about the house, devising ways to do the impossible: disappoint his parents. “Was it so hard, in this day and age, for a young homosexual watercolorist to be disowned by his family?” His watercolors of the local harbor have “failed to produce the sickeningly strong touristic nausea he had so hoped to achieve,” disappointing him with their loveliness.

"The book is a deliciously funny personality stew, and James deftly guides us from one character’s head to another as they maneuver their way through a madcap summer --- one that you, dear reader, should definitely share."

To round out the cast of characters, we have Michelle, the personal assistant; her crush Bradford, the handsome ne’er-do-well houseguest; Gracie Sloane, Carol’s friend and self-help guru; and Marvelous Matthews, gardener and recovering alcoholic.

The plot is loosely organized around a Midsummer Feast that Carol has planned for “the community.” Marvelous, who is hired to plant the vegetables that could be on the menu, struggles to explain it to a disbelieving Frank the first time they meet. “‘The community,’ said Marvelous, pronouncing the word the as if it were a heavy stone he had been carrying a long time, looking for a place to lay it down.” Frank is not convinced, and responds at first with an expletive. Yet as the summer wears on, his mood surges while Carol’s wavers. He cooks all the food for the Midsummer Feast --- beginning with Chevre, Figs and Sauteed Onions on Toast Bites, and ending with Cold Shredded Carrot Salad with Orange Juice. As a lark, Frank even begins his own self-help book, The Widdicombe Way, with chapters such as “Here’s Truth in Your Eyes.”

CHEER UP, MR. WIDDICOMBE is rather like a PG Wodehouse novel, updated with sex and profanity: throw a bunch of wealthy, eccentric people in a country house for a period of time and see what happens. In this, his first novel, Evan James expertly unfolds hopes, dreams and neuroses, managing to gently skewer his characters’ foibles while revealing their humanity. We chuckle at the antics of Marvelous and Gracie’s newfound love, but in the same breath we are moved (at least I was). The pace is even and delightful. James has a talent for illuminating how people really think, how one’s thoughts can go from comfortable to confused in the space of a few seconds. “He guessed that maybe love could look like different things at different points in your life, and that all of those things could still be love. Then he felt not so sure about that.”

The book is a deliciously funny personality stew, and James deftly guides us from one character’s head to another as they maneuver their way through a madcap summer --- one that you, dear reader, should definitely share.