I Pass Like Night

All of the sexual inconsistencies of Ames' first-person narrators form a collective metaphor for the human condition, at least the part that's honest enough to admit it: we're all just as curious about, and inconsistent with, our sexuality at some point between puberty and death. Ames' narrators are simply refusing to follow the popular and convenient trend of bracketing sexuality...

Jonathan Ames began this first novel while in college. Self-deprecatingly, he's written elsewhere that he "prematurely ejaculated [it] at 25." It's a sad and sometimes haunting story told in a forty-odd often gem-like short chapters. A boy: his family, his childhood and adolescence, and his present life, which veers between feeling like too much ("I'm an apple with a razor inside") and too little - each and every day. Protagonist Alexander Vine is adored by his mother, who has told him "If anything happened to you, my life would be over." He has problems with his father (he cannot bear to hear him eat). He goes to summer camp and gets poison ivy. He plays in the woods with friends as a child. He totals the family car playing "Starsky and Hutch" with a buddy. He loves his great-aunt, and mourns the loss of his grandfather. He's afraid of a lot of things. He's afraid of germs, but likes bums, drunks, and street people very much. The adult Vine at times can barely get out the door. "I spent the whole day moving in and out of consciousness between naps and reveries, counting the hours until the free phone-sex message would change." He recalls the details of a wholly conventional and loving middle-class family and upbringing (sometimes with a lot of humor). He frequents peep shows and prostitutes. He is a good friend to his friends. Sex with both men and women (and there is a lot of it in his story) means everything and nothing to the protagonist: excitement, anticipation, surrender and the hope of communion, an escape from boredom. But the event never quite succeeds the way he hopes that it will. He wants passion and love - and never gives up hope.Like F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Crack-Up," these interesting pieces vary in length and in mood, are arresting and varied, are either autobiographical or not, and together form a terrifically cohesive whole. I enjoyed this novel very much.

This is an exceptionally moving, delicately structured novel. The (anti)hero is a product of brutal psychological abuse at the hands of a weepy father whose despair and self-hatred graft themselves onto his young son's body, haunting the son on his self-obliterating path through life. The examination of the young man's own desparate need and failure to give and receive love are the novel's greatest, and most devastating, accomplishments. The unflinching manner and lightness of touch land Ames somewhere between Plath and Hemingway. ... ...

There is a real sweetness about Jonathan Ames' writing. Like Richard Brautigan, he uses simple sentence structures that allow us to experience incredible events with a sense of wonder. The sexual subject matter juxtaposed with the innocence of the writing style generates a creative tension which illuminates the inner conflict between Alexander, the main character, and the world he inhabits. The image Ames uses is of Halloween and finding the apple with the razor blade in it. Ultimately, that is the universal characteristic we experience that makes the material accessible, the incredibly human experience of having the good and the bad, the perfect and the imperfect, combined. I'm glad both "I Pass Like Night" and "The Extra Man" are out in paperback and am looking forward to Ames' new book "What's Not to Love." I wonder how he might write a female protagonist. Ames is fresh and well-written. Enjoy the apple but watch out for the razor blade!

"I Pass Like Night" is the first novel by Jonathan Ames, who has gone on to write the very funny, "The Extra Man," and whose ribald and eccentric (and frequently hilarious) columns appear in the free weekly, The NY Press, in NYC. Today, Ames' writing has a light feel about it, as if he is flittling through troubled waters without a care. "I Pass Like Night" does not have that quality. It is dark and seamy, and the protagonist frequently seems genuinely confused and afraid of the world. The subject matter -- sex of every shape and variation -- is his forte. Here, unlike in his columns where he frequently encounters women, or in "The Extra Man," where he frequents transvestite hookers, Ames begins in a park with a hooker and progresses (?) to being picked up and virtually raped by men. It is not funny like his present writing. That said, it is a very engaging book. Through reminiscences of his childhood, we get a glimpse of why he is the way he is. And that is very rare today. Very little writing does that, or even attempts to go there. (The writing on the HBO series "The Sopranos" does this with great skill.) I do prefer "The Extra Man" to "I Pass Like Night," but I own them both, have read them both more than once, and recommend them both. Jonathan Ames is a very entertaining writer. Twenty years from now, I suspect we might consider his stuff "important."