Customer Reviews

The Extra Man

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Boy am I glad I picked up "Extra Man" before anything else by Jonathan Ames. Struck by his work for the New York Press, I finally found this book secondhand and it's a classic! Ames has a very distinctive and winning voice and his New York is a perfect balance of charm, chaos and perversion. Unfortunately, Ames tends to recycle the best bits in his work, but what incredible bits! His great aunt should be bronzed and put in Central Park as an unforgettable New York character. She needs a book of her own, Jonathan!

Quite simply this is the best novel I have ever had the experience of reading. I think it is the main character that I love so much. I can not relate to him but he is dangerously human. Many books that I read lack real characterisitcs in thier chraracters but this one has real thoughts and quirks. I could go on forever I suppose but YOU should just stop reading the reviews and buy the damn book so that Jonathan Ames can eat.

It's a shame so few readers out there no of the modern day Roth, a mister Jonthan Ames. If you are anyone with a sense of humor, and not some annoying intellectual who sits around adult eductation writing courses preaching the importance of boring description words, this is a MUST READ. A shame Nick Hornsby has cornered the market on 1st person male neuroses, because Ames is more inventive, writes hysterical dialogue, and creates characters more memorable than anything i've read or seen on the big screen in a long, long time. So read this book, and you'll never look at a transexual the same way again!

Reading this brilliant novel, I can't help but thinking what a shame it is the author remains largely unknown. Part Fitzgerald/part Bukowski, Ames is a master of noticing 1st person male neuroses but and is as inventive with his characters and dialogue as any modern out there! Aone with a sense of humor needs to read this!!! Hysterically funny this is a book you'll read in one sitting, not because of simplistic style, but because it's that damn good!!! Oh, and you'll never look at a transexual the same way again.

The Extra Man would send an extra line up Freud's nose...keep him up late enough to read it again...then do some rethinking!

"So I saw that strap dangling out of the bag like a snake and I was alarmed," Louis Ives, the protagonist, reports on the first page of the novel. He's at a day school in Princeton, on break in the teacher's lounge when he notices the strap, which turns out to be a colleague's brassiere. A combination of curiosity and something else in the character of Ives that can only be understood by reading the following pages, drives him to try it on and prance around. After all, he's alone for a while- but not long enough. The opening scene sends young Ives away from Princeton and into New York City- where he starts over, sharing a dingy apartment with Henry Harrison, a washed up old gent who adheres to a simple motto: "Through troubles and into more troubles." Harrison proves to be more eccentric than Ives, and the transvestite dives where he [Ives] feels most at home. The relationship between the two is hillarious and endearing. Through the eyes of Ives, it's often reminiscent of Higgins and Doolittle. Through Harrison, of Kafka and his father. The prose is honest and concise and doesn't allow pauses. I enjoyed The Extra Man so much that I gave it to my brother for Christmas, who usually prefers television to literature. He's suddenly changed his mind.

I read this book because I read a review that made the character of Henry Harrison sound interesting. I was expecting descriptions of parties and dates with rich people that would fill me in on a side of society I don't have contact with. It was not like that at all, but instead it was very true-to-life in comparison with my own experiences of being in new places.

Ives' inner fancies of himself as the young gentleman are drawing him into an odd acquaintance with Henry Harrison. And Harrison is just exactly like some people I have known who try to live off of others' social status. There is something about the spacing of the episodes and the things that go unexplained or detailed that exactly mimics the feeling one gets when spending a lot of time in this half-world.

And, interestingly, more and more of Ives' secret "predilections" become exposed, and his sense of shame and fear. He is such a sensitive character, and actually so well-rounded, that I felt the injustice of his fear of following his sexual curiosities and desires.

The way the book unfolds is actually a mirror of how one comes to know better and better individual people. Also, for some reason, the descriptions of cars and parking arrangements in this book are exceptionally charming writing.

Hey,what country and
/or what century this Henry believes to live (if you can call it living)in?"Women should not go to school?" "the problem of homosexuality?". Surely this man has problems, even bigger than his clumsy would-be-drag-queen-friend. What a sorry flop of a book!

After reading Ames's hilarious collection of memoirs "What's Not to Love?", I was curious to discover how well his fiction would compare. I've got to say that I was not disappoint. This novel, while maintaining the offbeat humor of Ames's essays, is surprisingly deep, tender, and charming. "The Extra Man" proved to me that Ames is much more than just a comic writer... he's a creative and moving one as well. This may be an admittedly awkward hybrid of vastly dissimilar authors, but "The Extra Man" struck me as a lovely combination of Fitzgerald and John Kennedy Toole. I loved this novel, and I cannot wait for Ames to publish fiction again.

At times I felt like I was reading two of my other favorite novels, David Copperfield and Rabbit Run. Ives has traits of a Christian Existentialist even if he is Jewish (can there be a Jewish Existentialist?), and the fleshing out of so many characters (including the mysterious city) reminds me of Dickens.
At any rate, bravo!!!!

A fun read, just like his other work (I Pass Like Night, which seems a study for the Pervert Adventures, i.e., What's Not to Love). Extra Man is Some Like it Hot meets the Confederacy of Dunces. Think the confusion of the Crying Game sans the surprise package. I love Jonathan's simple yet powerful prose.