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Jonathan Ames
“All writers have to provoke a
reaction,” Jonathan Ames said to Sarah Stodola in an interview for
Me Three (June 2004, on-line). “You have to hold the reader's
attention. My first goal as a writer is not to bore.” With the
novels I Pass Like Night (1989), The Extra Man (1998),
and Wake Up, Sir! (2004) and essay collections including,
most recently, I Love You More Than You Know (2006), Ames has
provoked reactions that range from admiration and raucous laughter
to discomfort and revulsion—but probably not, to date, boredom. A
chief feature of both Ames's fiction and nonfiction is the
unflinching openness he brings to topics usually referred to
euphemistically or not mentioned at all, such as sexual obsession
and perversion or various body ailments (irritable bowel syndrome is
just one example). While the characters and themes of his novels
have led Ames to be compared to such past prose masters as F. Scott
Fitzgerald and P. G. Wodehouse, his nonfiction pieces have been
likened to those of his contemporary David Sedaris. “I steal from
all the writers I love,” Ames admitted to Stodola. “It probably
doesn't show since I'm a slug and they're gods, but I steal from
them.”
The only son of Irwin Ames, a salesman
of textile chemicals, and Florence Mann, a special-education
teacher, Jonathan Spencer Ames was born on March 23, 1964 in New
York City. He grew up 40 miles outside the city, in the middle-class
New Jersey town of Oakland. His parents instilled in him a love of
reading. Each month Ames’s mother, who wrote poetry, would order a
wide variety of books and magazines, including sports biographies
and comic books, through a school-affiliated catalog, allowing Ames
to choose whatever he wanted. He recalled to Current Biography,
“We weren’t rich, but when it came to books there seemed to be no
cutting corners.” Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan books and the novels
of J. R. R. Tolkien sparked Ames's desire to be creative and have
adventures. In addition to making up games that involved running
through the woods, Ames and his friends channeled much of their
energy into fishing, swimming, and playing a variety of sports.
Ames attended Valley Middle School and
Indian Hills High School. In those years he read the offbeat novels
of Kurt Vonnegut as well as Hunter S. Thompson’s nonfiction work
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the latter of which fed Ames's
desire to be, as he put it to Current Biography, a “crazy
journalist.” During his sophomore year of high school, under the
tutelage of a teacher, Anne Peters, he began writing sports pieces
for the school newspaper, Drumbeats; he also contributed
sports articles to a weekly town paper, the Wyckoff News. In
addition, he had humorous pieces printed in the Bergen County, New
Jersey, Record, a major daily in the area. In 1981, when he
was 17, he purchased a copy of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road,
whose first chapter contained a line that would serve thereafter as
a reference point for Ames: “I was a young writer and I wanted to
take off.” Ames became the editor of Drumbeats, graduated
among the top 15 students in his class, and earned five varsity
letters in sports including soccer, cross-country running, and
tennis. He was also one of the top three saber fencers in the state
and among the top 12 in the country.
The latter achievement helped Ames to
win admittance to Princeton University, in Princeton, New Jersey,
where he enrolled in September 1982. During his college years, as he
informed Current Biography, he “fell in with the artists and
the nuts and the malcontents.” In 1986 the esteemed novelist Joyce
Carol Oates, who was Ames’s thesis adviser, gave him a copy of
Hubert Selby Jr.’s cult novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn, as he
was starting work on his thesis, a novella entitled “I Pass Like
Night.” Selby’s novel, along with the works of Raymond Carver,
Ernest Hemingway, and Jerzy Kosinski (particularly his 1968 novel,
Steps), served as the main influences for the novella. Ames
graduated from Princeton in 1987. In the following year he expanded
his novella into a full-length novel, which was published in 1989.
Ames, who had been living in Paris, France, for several months,
returned to the U.S. in time for the book's publication.
Reviewers of I Pass Like Night
found much promise in the fledgling author’s debut, noting that its
scenes of urban decay were reminiscent of such films as Midnight
Cowboy and Taxi Driver. The coming-of-age novel's
narrator and protagonist, Alexander Vine, defies his Jewish family’s
expectations that he will attend college and enter a prestigious
profession; instead, he ekes out a living in the harrowing streets
of the Bowery, mostly from tips acquired as a hotel doorman. When
night falls, Vine, chiefly out of ennui, engages in drunken
homosexual affairs and visits prostitutes. Critics were quick to
compare Vine to Holden Caulfield, the teenage narrator of J. D.
Salinger's much-celebrated novel The Catcher in the Rye. Hugo
Giles, assessing Ames's novel for the Hobart (Australia) Mercury
(December 23, 1989), wrote, “In the jaded 80s I Pass Like Night
is unlikely to achieve the same shock impact as Catcher but
it is a moving and anguished reflection of a generation in crisis.”
Some complained that because Vine was not given to introspection,
readers were prevented from developing an attachment to the
character. For the most part, however, the debut was well-received.
Despite the acclaim, Ames would spend
most of the next decade, as he recalled to Current Biography,
leading “a hand-to-mouth existence.” For two years beginning in
1990, finding himself with little money, he drove a taxi in
Princeton; meanwhile, he worked on a second novel. In 1992 he
enrolled in the graduate writing program at Columbia University, in
New York, earning an M.F.A. degree in 1995 with the aim of securing
a teaching position. In addition to other jobs he held during that
period, Ames taught composition at a business school and creative
writing at the Gotham Writer’s Workshop. He also launched his oral
storytelling career with a monologue at New York’s Fez nightclub and
other venues. Ames completed his novel The Extra Man in
September 1996 and began shopping it around to prospective
publishers; the book was rejected by 20 houses before Scribner
accepted it. Published in 1998, The Extra Man follows the
adventures of Louis Ives, who, after getting fired from a teaching
position at a Princeton prep school because of a cross-dressing
incident, goes to New York and meets up with an eccentric, asexual
playwright, Henry Harrison. Henry, who serves as an “extra man” for
elderly high-society women at dinner parties, schools Louis in
everything from maintaining chivalrous behavior and dressing in a
sophisticated manner to sneaking into Broadway plays and escaping
notice while relieving himself in the street.
Ames’s comedy of manners got a warm
reception, with Scott Eyman writing for the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer (November 2, 1998), “In Henry and Louis, Ames
has created—or transcribed—two of the most startlingly human
characters in recent fiction.” Francine Prose wrote for the New
York Observer, as posted on Amazon.com, “Ames has the one thing
[F. Scott] Fitzgerald lacked: a sense of humor. . . . The Extra
Man wins us over with its sheer energy and good will, its
confidence in the ability of its own humor and intelligence to widen
our ideas about the possibilities of love, and about the permissible
range of inner and outer lives to which today's young gentleman may
properly aspire.” The novel won comparison to such classic
odd-couple tales as the movie Harold and Maude and John
Steinbeck's novel Of Mice and Men; Ames, for his part, has
said that he based Louis Ives in part on the man-about-town
characters of Fitzgerald and Oscar Wilde. (Like some of Wilde's
sexually adventurous characters, Ives enjoys the company of the
transgendered.) Ames’s own fascination and personal experiences with
transvestites were reflected in a passage in The Extra Man
that finds Ives in one of his favorite bars, where a drag queen
tells him, “You're not really straight, but you're not really gay.
You're straightish.” Ames told Matthew Flamm for Newsday (August 30,
1998), “I don’t know what straight people think of me.” He described
himself as “probably the gayest straight writer in America” and
added, “I don't know what I think of me.”
In 1999 Ames received a Guggenheim
fellowship and mounted a one-man, Off-Off-Broadway show,
Oedipussy—a cocktail of self-deprecation, surrealism, and sex
that made references to figures ranging from Sigmund Freud and
Marcel Proust to Porky Pig. Some critics praised the show, likening
Ames's storytelling style to those of Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce,
while others were less favorably impressed. A reviewer for the
Village Voice (February 16, 1999) wrote, “There are some
hilarious moments in Jonathan Ames's Oedipussy, but his . . .
shtick is utterly cliched.” In a reference to a radio “shock jock,”
the reviewer added that Oedipussy seemed like “a master’s
thesis from the creative writing program at Howard Stern
University.”
In late 1996, meanwhile, Ames had begun
writing essays for New York Press; he was given his own column there
in the fall of 1997, attracting a cult following with his humorous,
self-deprecatory style. In 2000 he left New York Press to
teach creative writing for two semesters as a visiting professor at
Indiana University. While there he published a book of his “City
Slicker” columns from the New York Press, titling the
collection What’s Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly
Perverted Young Writer. The book's largely autobiographical
subject matter ranges from sex and venereal disease to bodily
sensations not generally mentioned in print or polite conversation.
“Like any good (albeit shticky) performer—[Woody] Allen, [Jerry]
Seinfeld, and a thousand Catskills comedians before them—Ames openly
provokes the reader to have fun at his own expense, even as he
admits to thoughts of suicide,” Maya Kremen wrote for the Village
Voice (June 27, 2000). In 2004 What’s Not to Love?
inspired a Showtime television network pilot in which the humorist
played himself; the pilot did not develop into a series.
Ames returned to New York in 2002. That
year he followed up What's Not to Love? with a second
autobiographical work, My Less Than Secret Life, comprising
five short stories and 42 essays, the latter including past New
York Press installments, book reviews, and e-zine contributions.
As posted on Amazon.com, a contributor to Publishers Weekly
noted about the book, among whose pieces are “Booty and the Beast,”
“The Orgy,” and “The Nista Affair,” that Ames is “like the dirtiest,
smartest kid on the playground: you might cringe, but you can't help
being transfixed.” In 2003 the late-night talk-show host David
Letterman came across one of Ames’s books, and afterward the writer
appeared on Letterman's Late Show three times in 18 months.
Ames's third novel, Wake Up, Sir!
(2004), paid homage to the humor novelist P. G. Wodehouse. (Ames has
said that rediscovering Wodehouse's works in the early 2000s helped
to lift him from a bout of depression.) The novel's main character,
a talented, alcoholic writer named Alan Blair, goes to an artists’
colony, where he falls in love with a mannish female sculptor. Blair
is helped throughout by his discreet, preternaturally efficient
butler, Jeeves (one of Wodehouse’s most memorable characters).
Reviewers of the novel compared Ames to his fellow humorist David
Sedaris, with D. K. Row writing for the Oregonian (July 18,
2004), “Ames is a better writer than the more famous Sedaris. . . .
Ames is more genuine, daring and unabashed than other humorists he’s
often grouped with, tackling everything from homosexual impulses to
Jewish self-loathing. He exposes himself more, literally and
figuratively, leaving no thought, person or psychosis unexamined.
And he does so with a humanity and a style that, on a phrase level,
is rarely matched by many essayists and humorists today.” In another
assessment of Wake Up, Sir!, Ben S. Pollock, writing for the
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (September 19, 2004), hailed Ames
as “a humorist for our age.”
In 2005 Ames brought his fascination
with transsexualism to the editing of a book, Sexual
Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs. The volume
is comprised of excerpts of writings by transsexuals, taken from
books and manuscripts housed at Indiana University's Kinsey
Institute. (The institute is named after its founder, the famed sex
expert Alfred Kinsey.) Jim Nawrocki, writing for Gay & Lesbian
Review Worldwide (January 1, 2006), called Ames's choice of
material “very good,” adding that it is “fairly representative of
the range of transsexualism.” The anthology begins with case studies
from the late 19th century and ends with memoirs from as recent as
2003.
In early 2006 Ames published his third collection of
autobiographical essays, I Love You More Than You Know. The
collection juxtaposes the outrageous and the sentimental; in one
piece, for instance, he recalls leaving the library, where he is
supposed to be working while his mother looks after his young son,
to visit a dominatrix; in another, he gives a sweet account of
visiting his 90-year-old great-aunt, Doris, in her Queens, New York,
apartment. That essay includes the passage, “I love her desperately
and as she gets older—especially of late, as she becomes more
feeble—my love seems to be picking up velocity, overwhelming me
almost, tinged as it is with panic: I’m so afraid of losing her.” D.
Grant Black wrote for the Toronto Globe and Mail (March 18,
2006), “When you think all this guy can be counted on is to deliver
toilet and pervert humour, he changes gears with a sentimental
vignette.” Ames explained to Ruth Graham for New York Sun
(April 22, 2005) about his work, “I tend to find that I work best
from a first-person vehicle, taking a weird aspect of my personality
and then expanding it into a character—kind of like those shrinky
dolls that might be tiny and then you pour water on them and they
grow.”
Ames, whom D. Grant Black described as
“a prematurely bald man with the health afflictions of a senior,”
lives in Brooklyn, New York. He has a number of projects underway or
recently completed, including a cover story on the musician Marilyn
Manson for the June 2007 issue of Spin magazine and a graphic
novel, The Alcoholic, which will be published in 2008 by DC
Comics, with illustrations by Dean Haspiel. Ames has written
screenplay adaptations for The Extra Man and for Darcy
O’Brien’s novel A Way of Life, Like Any Other. He is an
occasional orator and host of a storytelling series called “The
Moth,” organized by a nonprofit group based in New York City that is
dedicated to fresh takes on the art of storytelling. Retaining his
interest in sports, Ames has developed a passion for boxing and has
even competed in amateur matches. On July 26, 2007 he defeated the
Canadian writer Craig Davidson in a bout at Gleason's Boxing Gym in
Brooklyn. In the press Ames has been linked romantically to the
singer-songwriter Fiona Apple.
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