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This is the third Jonathan Ames book I've read this year (the others being 'The Extra Man' and 'What's Not To Love') and reading them in such close succession was probably a mistake. The reason it was probably a mistake is because there is an incredible amount of similar (and even virtually identical) material in all three books. Reading them so close to one another is a rather repetitive experience.It's a shame, really, as reading just one of them is a delight... any one of them, really. They a...
I saw Jonathan Ames do a reading about a year ago at the KGB Bar and left with the urge to find his short story collection and gobble it up. He's witty and sex-obsessesed in a nervous sort of way, yet somehow manages to come off as more F. Scott Fitzgerald than Woody Allen. His essay, "American Gothic," about interviewing Goths at a music festival was particularly wonderful, and I used it in one of my classes this past semester. To make a long story short, I recently began watching reruns of the...
I think Ames maybe my most favorite living writer at the moment - well along with Dennis Cooper - and you can't compare both authors so forget that route.But nevertheless Ames has a love for PG Wodehouse or Gentlemen British literature - and when you mixed that up with a slight Woody Allen New Jersey/Manhattan mixture it's makes a great cocktail. In a nutshell it is about a struggling author with a drink problem who goes to a writer's retreat and one gets the feeling this is his last chance. But...
Strange, weird, funny, sad, black, dark, hilarious. These are some of the words I would use to describe this book. It's unlike anything else I have ever read. It's like an original parody, so so peculiar, but I really enjoyed it, and although it's been compared to Jeeves and Wooster there is a lot more to it than that. I would say taking an in depth look into Wooster's psyche with some rather bleak, poignant and side splitting moments would be more like it. Well worth a read. I can't stop thinki...
Jonathan Ames is a total fucking treasure. I liked this even more than THE EXTRA MAN, which is saying something, as I loved that. In this book he channels both the surface of PG Wodehouse and the undercurrent as well, the melancholy beneath the amusing compounding scrapes the hero is always getting into, to be saved ultimately and always by Jeeves, who in Ames might or might not be real, and whose incarnation in WAKE UP, SIR! makes you look back at the Wodehouse books and wonder if he was imagin...
Being a big Wodehouse fan, I was intrigued by the book's premise but also wary. The first thing to say is that, although obviously intended as a homage to Wodehouse, the use of the relationship between the ditzy alcoholic Jewish writer and his valet who just happens to be called Jeeves (although he also acts and speaks like the original) is somewhat superfluous to the rest of the novel. Jeeves plays little or no part in the plot other than being a sounding-board for the haphazardly quirky ideas
I've never been so entertained by reading a book in which almost nothing happens.
This was my first Jonathan Ames novel. My expectations where high as I had thoroughly enjoyed his short story and journalism collection. Throughout the book there are hysterical dialogues and interplays between the main character Alain, and the people be it his rich Aunt and Uncle, his Butler Jeeves, and the people that he encounters along the way to the Writer's Colony. Incidentally Jonathon Ames was the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship award. The first quarter of the book was very tight
When I started reading I was prepared to be extremely disappointed. A sheer rip-off of the Jeeves novels. It got better, but I wasn't entirely impressed. There were humorous moments but nothing that would make me want to read anything of Mr. Ames' again.Mr. Ames does have fun with the main character going off on tangents but it can be a blessing or a curse depending on the subject's appeal to the reader. The most memorable and fun scene is where three drunk and high characters decide they are on...
I mean, I really don't think I even need to read any more Jonathan Ames novels because there is so much overlap between them and the show I love, Bored to Death. This one is kind of a wild ride between Ames fleeing family then a crazy fight, then a disaster at an artist colony. I don't know how much of it is fact but Ames writes as if every single word were a page from his every accumulating diary that he's revealing for the sake of your own pleasure. In some ways, though it's way more personal,...
