His Ames True

These eyes have seen a lot of love: Author Jonathan Ames. Courtesy Publishers Group Canada.

Any freelance writer will tell you that scoring a regular column is a godsend. In addition to the steady paycheque, it offers a soupçon of prestige. That’s how Jonathan Ames felt when he began his bi-weekly “City Slicker” column for New York Press, one of the city’s alternative weeklies, in 1997. Although he’d earned keen notices for his first novel, 1989’s I Pass Like Night — Philip Roth called him “an authentic voice of youthful suffering” — at the time, Ames was still unfamiliar to most New Yorkers. Every two weeks, Ames would regale Gothamites with tales of, among other things, his stomach troubles, his physical faults (“My Wiener is Damaged!”), his romantic mishaps and, most notoriously, his abiding interest in the transsexual lifestyle (though only as a spectator).

“A lot of the columns in the paper were first person, and so then you’re like, ‘Oh no, I shouldn’t put that down.’ But it would be something that people would relate to or laugh at,” says Ames, trailing off. Suffice it to say, he didn’t censor himself.

Ames retired the column in 2000, but not before earning a reputation as one of America’s most daring comic writers — “the George Plimpton of the colon,” in Ames’s own estimation. A batch of his columns were anthologized in What’s Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer (2001), and later in My Less Than Secret Life (2002). Since then, his work has appeared everywhere from Spin to McSweeney’s to The Onion.

The essays in his latest collection, I Love You More Than You Know, range from a demoralizing stay at Club Med (“Club Existential Dread”) to a decadent book tour (“Whores, Writers, and a Pimple: My Trip to Europe”) to a contest Ames devised to find the most phallic building in the world. (The winner was a water tower in Ypsilanti, Michigan.)

While he has done some quasi-journalistic reportage, his narratives usually meander back to Ames himself. A piece about the 2002 Mike Tyson-Lennox Lewis boxing fight (“Everybody Dies in Memphis”) is less about the match than Ames’s picaresque attempts to get local colour. (The story opens with Ames nearly castrating himself while scaling a wire fence.)

More genuine than David Sedaris, more introspective than David Rakoff, Ames’s humour is a canny mixture of pathology and pathos. Reading him, you’re struck by two things: his self-lacerating wit and his indomitable gall. Your first assumption is that Ames goes looking for trouble/humour. He attests that his pieces merely chronicle a lively existence.

“Some people push the boundaries of life more than others, and usually that’s when calamities occur,” says Ames over the phone from his Brooklyn home, sounding far less neurotic than he comes across in print. “In the piece where I went off with a dominatrix, I didn’t do that to write about it. I was just behaving nuttily. People who have better control of themselves, at least externally, might not have as many misadventures.”

Courtesy Publishers Group Canada.

The essay he’s referring to (“No Contact, Asshole!”) appears in I Love You More Than You Know, and it’s both prurient and utterly heartbreaking. The episode begins at Ames’s parents’ home in New Jersey, where he was staying in the summer of 1990 with his then-four-year-old son. While reading the newspaper, Ames sees an ad for a dominatrix. Plagued by ennui, Ames calls her, and embarks on a sexual escapade that begins with a rendezvous at a T.G.I. Friday’s restaurant and culminates in an ungainly threesome in a New Jersey basement.

The yarn is typically riotous, but takes a melancholic turn when Ames takes his son to a public pool and sees the physical vestiges of his debauchery. “I was disgusted that my beautiful son should come in contact with those bruises. Why am I like this? I thought. What is wrong with me? I hated myself, but I had to love him.” In another essay in I Love You, Ames muses about what draws him to the seamy side of life: “I have what the Marquis de Sade called la nostalgie de la boue — a nostalgia of the mud. Or to put it more simply, I’ve always been drawn to the gutter; I like the people I meet there.” Ames writes about some of society’s most colourful outsiders, but none more than himself.

“I guess sometimes when people judge me by what they’ve read and not how I treat them, it gets all mixed up,” Ames admits. “Eventually, if someone spends enough time with me, the real me emerges.”

Despite his mastery of the comic essay, Ames says he gets the biggest charge out of writing novels.

“I ultimately prefer fiction,” says Ames, “because you can change things, hide things, masquerade things and not put yourself on the firing line quite so severely.” Besides I Pass Like Night, Ames has produced two other novels: The Extra Man (1999) and Wake Up, Sir! (2004). The latter features Alan Blair, a boozy, penurious, Ames-like character that, improbably, has a personal servant named Jeeves. The similarities to P.G. Wodehouse’s inimitable comic duo, Wooster and Jeeves, is no coincidence. After an agonizing breakup with his girlfriend in 2000, Ames rediscovered Wodehouse — and realized the palliative effects of his writing. Says Ames, “That’s where I got the idea for the book: of someone curing a depression by reading Wodehouse, which is kind of what Alan Blair ends up doing.”

One of the most revealing essays in I Love You is “Self-Sentenced,” in which Ames takes stock of his career in letters, placing himself in the context of other novelists named Jonathan: Franzen, Lethem, Dee, Coe and Safran Foer. “I have to say that with all these Jonathans running around, it’s like we’re the Brothers Karamazov,” he writes, “and I see myself as the sickly, subnormal brother who is always wandering off into the black Russian forest and is found screwing sap holes in trees. He’s then brought back to the family and the father whips him.”

The sentence is a vintage Ames construction: it begins straight-faced and ends with mortifying hilarity. While he shows no modesty in sharing his neuroses, one thing Ames has trouble with is thinking of himself as a “humourist.”

“It’s like holding up a mirror and saying, ‘Oh, that’s what the back of my head looks like.’ As soon as you drop the mirror, you go back to not being able to see the back of your head. You just stumble and muddle forward, doing what it is you do.” I Love You More Than You Know is published by Grove/Atlantic and is in bookstores now.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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