I’m so exhausted by my birthday party that that I can hardly get off the couch.  Pop-up cards! A picnic!  Hours of conversation!

And so I’m sitting around reading Nancy Mitford.

No one is wittier than Nancy Mitford, and her last novel, Don’t Tell Alfred (1960), is her best and funniest.  Fanny, the narrator of Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, returns in middle age to narrate her latest adventures. Her husband, Alfred, a professor at Oxford, is appointed the English Ambassador in France. Quelle surprise!

I laughed as I reread Don’t Ask Alfred. Nothing can be more hilarious than Fanny’s adventures in France.  She hears mysterious laughter – are there ghosts with a sense of humor at the embassy? And then she learns that Lady Leone, the former ambassador’s wife, “secretly” moved into a small apartment downstairs and refuses to leave.  The brightest minds in France cannot persuade her to leave.  Absolutely hilarious!

And then there are visits from Fanny’s vagabond sons.  The two oldest, both with firsts at Oxford, have gone rogue from the intelligentsia.  One is a Zen Beatnik, the other a tour guide for a dicey travel agency. The younger boys are presumably safe at Eton, where their education is supposed to make them more conventional. And then they escape in a Rolls Royce, along with a rebellious friend, because the food is bad, or so they tell the headmaster. In London they get involved with a famous pop star, Yanky Fonzy, who nearly causes riots in the streets when they all arrive at the embassy in France.

Hilarious dialogue, a top-notch understanding of politics, an amusing comparison of the generations, a cast of mostly likable eccentrics, and a charming, down-to-earth narrator:  you can’t go wrong.