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900 pages later, I can confirm what my friend Wales told me: this book has nothing to do with the Tom Jones who asked, "What's new, pussycat?"

Instead, it's a massive blow-up of a classic Shakespeare comedy that exactly follows the classic structure: our likable heroes are introduced; a series of miscommunications and devious acts by rivals conspire to rend them apart; you know how act V goes in these things, and you'll see it coming here as soon as you realize this book is a comedy, which if it's not at the Table of Contents, you're not reading very carefully.

(Romantic comedies, of course, still follow this exact structure today (see Meet the Parents and every Jennifer Lopez movie), and it still leaves me tearing my non-existent hair out at everyone's steadfast refusal to have a simple conversation that would clear all this up.)

By "massive blow-up" I mean not a deconstruction but a really, really long version of a Shakespeare comedy, and this book is too long. Despite the pleasantness of the prose, and the not infrequent passages that actually made me laugh, it's a meandering shaggy dog of a story and it'd be better-known and better-loved today had Fielding had an editor.

But it is pleasant, and that puts it worlds above Fielding's bitter rival Samuel Richardson, the author of a book I recently detested. This, i just liked.