The Coming of Bill

An artist named Kirk Winfield and his wife Ruth are happy until the arrival of their son turns his upbringing into a battleground. Ruth’s overbearing aunt, a believer in eugenics and scientific child-rearing, moves in with rigid theories about how young Bill must be raised, and her meddling, along with mounting money worries, slowly pulls the marriage apart. Lighter in touch than its subject sounds, the book pokes fun at fashionable pseudo-science and the tyranny of well-meaning relatives while taking its family drama more seriously than most Wodehouse. It is one of his softer, more sentimental novels, closer to domestic comedy than farce. Free to read here in PDF and EPUB.