What a Coincidence

Oh, don’t worry that the plot was just spoiled. That is just the first few pages of the book. Most of the book is all about how all these characters end up in the same castle in England. Throw in a bunch more characters, parties, jewels, thefts, detectives, valets, and butlers.

Will Jimmy get the girl?

Of course he will. This is a Wodehouse novel, after all. They all have the same plot.

One feature of Wodehouse novels is a remarkable series of coincidences. Take the above. What are the odds Jimmy Pitt will end up breaking into the very home where the girl he saw on a boat is currently living? Near zero, right? And that she is the daughter of the chief of police who knows Jimmy’s new burglar friend? Or that the burglar would break in the very night Jimmy made his silly bet? And none of these are the most improbable coincidences of the novel—every one of these things is vastly more likely than the things we see happen in the rest of the novel.

So, Wodehouse acquires a reputation of telling improbable stories. Everything is always just too coincidental. It is incredibly unrealistic. Right?

But…what makes us think that coincidences are unrealistic? If life really free of coincidences?

A few weeks ago, I was telling a student with whom I have had quite a number of memorable conversations (many involving American Girl books) over the last two years the story about the Family Trust my grandfather set up to benefit a small cemetery in the town from which his family came. The Foundation benefits not just the cemetery but other nonprofits in two incredibly rural counties.

I then mentioned the name of the counties: Custer and Lemhi. The student’s jaw hit the floor. It turns out, she has relatives in exactly that part of the country. She went on vacation there all the time when she was growing up. We then swapped stories of going to Idaho for vacation when you were a kid.

What are the odds of finding out someone you know used to vacation as a kid in roughly the same parts of rural Idaho as you did. And let’s be clear. We are not in Idaho right now—we are in Massachusetts. Neither of us grew up in Idaho. We both just used to get hauled by our families on vacation to the middle of nowhere to visit relatives.

Improbable?

Or how about this. I was at a conference in Utah this summer. I was talking with the organizer of the conference, whom I had never met before. Swapping stories, we discover we both went to the same college, UC Davis. Not that improbable; it is a big school. But…we graduated in the same year. We shared a major. We almost certainly took classes together in those large lecture halls where you don’t know a soul. What are the odds?

Or this. I was at a conference in Kentucky a few years back. The conference was for high school history and social science teachers in Kentucky. I was talking with one of the teachers there and discovered she was also from California. Big state, not so surprising. She went to high school in San Jose. Big city, not so surprising. She went to the same high school I did. OK, a bit suspiring. She graduated one year after me. Here I am a professor at a liberal arts college in Massachusetts and she is a high school teacher in Kentucky and we meet at a conference nowhere near San Jose, California.

Things like that never happen, right?

It turns out, when you think about it, your life is full of improbable coincidences. Indeed, when you think about it, everything you have ever done, every place you have ever been, and every person you have ever met is an incredible coincidence. It is just most of the time, you never know how unusual it is that you met that particular person at that particular time in that particular place.

Cormac McCarthy memorably describes this phenomenon in No Country for Old Men:

So given that our lives are one big coincidence, why does Wodehouse seem so unrealistic?

Think about the stories I told above. Why did I pick those stories? Because they seem unusual. I could have told three other stories about talking with people which would not have seemed unusual. Most of those stories would seem pointless to relate. So, we naturally relate the stores which seem improbable.

Now consider the World of Wodehouse. If Jimmy Pitt had never again seen the girl from the boat, there is no story. In fact, if you imagine the full world in which this story is set, nobody else on that same boat had a story to tell. Why do we read Jimmy Pitt’s story? Because it is the only interesting story.

What are the odds that Jimmy Pitt would have this strange set of events in his life? That seems small. But what are the odds that someone on a boat will have an interesting story? That doesn’t seem improbable at all.

Maybe Wodehouse isn’t that unrealistic after all. Wodehouse is a clever one. His novels seem so effortless and fun and full of coincidence, but when you start looking at it, you realize he is actually describing what life is really like. Your life is full of incredibly improbable events. You just don’t notice them. Wodehouse does notice.

Embrace your inner Wodehouse. You think your life is full of dull routine, but you are immersed in an incredibly wonderful and complicated play, with improbable events and curious characters all around you. You just have to pay attention.

And there is no better way to remind yourself of this than to read P.G. Wodehouse.