The Extra Man (Contemporary Classics (Washington Square Press))

by Jonathan Ames

book data

387 ratings, 3.70 average rating, 50 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		21%
4		38%
3		31%
2		6%
1		2%

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published

July 1st 1999 by Scribner (first published 1998)

details

Paperback, 384 pages

isbn

0671015583 (isbn13: 9780671015589)

description

With a quirky edge and outrageous humor, Jonathan Ames has written a remarkable second novel -- a modern-day New York comedy of manners that explores …more

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Feb 18, 2010

Amanda rated it:

bookshelves: book-club

Read in March, 2010

recommended to Amanda by: Fred Northrup

When I moved to New York, fresh from college, double liberal arts degrees in hand and looking for work in book publishing, I ordered a subscription (The Weekender! Natch!) to the New York Times. Reading the Times every weekend was part of my idea of the New York version of myself, something I had mashed together from my just-post-college ambitions and my nervousness, and from reading novels about people in similar situations in the city. I imagined I would read the paper over coffee and a bagel ...more When I moved to New York, fresh from college, double liberal arts degrees in hand and looking for work in book publishing, I ordered a subscription (The Weekender! Natch!) to the New York Times. Reading the Times every weekend was part of my idea of the New York version of myself, something I had mashed together from my just-post-college ambitions and my nervousness, and from reading novels about people in similar situations in the city. I imagined I would read the paper over coffee and a bagel on Sunday mornings.

Of course, it took me a week to read a Sunday paper — the Sunday Times is huge! And I was trying to read all of it for some reason. I do not need to read the automobile section, ever, but I tried to. The papers started to pile up, and after about six months, I gave up. The way things were going those days I was rarely even awake until Sunday afternoon.

We all have these sort of idealized versions of ourselves, constructed from things we see and admire/covet in the people around us, from what we see in films or TV, and from what we read. We affect mannerisms, we pick up words, we adopt entire opinions and forget they aren't our own. We convince ourselves of the verity of things that are at best half-truths. The kind of person that moves to New York, especially, has this optimized idea of what his/her self will be in this place; this place both attracts those kinds of people, and this place has such a presence in literature and film that we are supplied with plenty of models. Louis Ives of The Extra Man is no exception to this tendency; an exaggerated example, to be sure, but good characters need some exaggeration.

Louis, narrator of Ames's comedy of manners, strives to be a "young gentleman." When he decides to move to New York (the "old Times Square" version, circa 1992), he arrives thinking that he will stay in a hotel while he searches for a more permanent home, as this is what the characters in his Henry James novels do. He, of course, finds that in 1992 hotels in New York are prohibitively expensive or alarmingly seedy. Typically, Louis thinks the tweaked-out homeless woman on the stairs is an artisty musician: he is trying to force his surroundings to conform to his own notion of what they will be. So he responds to an ad for a cheap apartment on the UES, which begins his relationship with Henry Harrison: calls-it-in professor, unpublished playwright, couch-sleeper, Ethel Mermen dancer, platonic gentleman friend of older ladies. Louis so desperately wants Henry's approval and friendship despite Henry's practiced distance. Nevertheless, hijinks ensue involving said dancing, said older ladies, transvestites, car crashes, hood ornament theft, caviar, benefit parties, stolen bras, Recession Spankologists, etc.

Louis is young, in a new city -- in THE city -- unsure of so many things: his sexuality, his gender identification, the morals of his new habits, where he is going at all. In the end, he arguably doesn't get very far from where he began the novel, at least not outright. But in the previously mentioned ensuing hijinks, Henry and Louis each get a bit of a peek under the other's facade, and some of the confusion and messiness beneath their gentlemanly airs is revealed. The two men are extreme and desperate examples of the personas we all adopt, the way we shape ourselves to a pastiche of the people and characters we encounter; but there's something familiar about that idealism and that aspiration.

Plus, some of the descriptions are really great; I loved Ames's description of the invisible car owners moving their vehicles from one side of the street to the other every day. Also at one point Louis describes himself as "showered and blue-blazered," which is also in a National song? Coincidence or allusion?

IN SUM! Good, worth a read; it goes quick despite it's length and the characters will probably stay with me for quite some time. However, didn't really inspire me to read Ames's essays or nonfiction.(less)

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3 comments

Nov 19, 2009

Nicholas rated it:

Read in November, 2009

Your highlight at location 531
I kept thinking that he was perhaps of a state of mind beyond eccentric, but there was also this constant underpinning of irony to everything he said which seemed to clearly indicate intelligence and sanity. He was conscious that he was outrageous, but he was also stating his honest beliefs.2b4c8b84B000FC0O5O

Your highlight at location 549
“Most frames are more beautiful than their pictures,” he said. “And less expensive.”2b4c8b84B000FC...more

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Mar 19, 2010

YiShun rated it:

Read in March, 2010

I've begun to realize that books whose jacket flap copy says they are "hilarious" yet "poignant" or some such variation are not for me.
This seemed to go nowhere forever. The relationship between roommates Henry and ... Chr*st, I can't even remember what the protagonist's name was now, and I just read the thing last night ... doesn't really hit a crisis point until the very end, really. And the protagonist (I can only remember his last name, Ives, and the moniker he use...more

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Mar 03, 2009

Djrmel rated it:

bookshelves: contemporary, fiction, humor, queer

Read in January, 2006

Louis Ives loses his job as a teacher in a Princeton, NJ boarding school, because of a minor cross dressing incident, and decides to start over in New York City. He also decides to continue on his path towards being a "young gentleman", using Fitzgerald and Waugh as his guides. Louis shares a rundown apartment with an eccentric elderly man who supplements his teacher's income by being an extra man (a well mannered man called upon to "even up" the male to female ratio at soci...more

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Jan 22, 2008

Brent Legault rated it:

recommends it for: no one, not anyone

There's a whole lot of hubbub about Ames but I don't understand it and after reading this book I'm thinking that maybe it's all been an elaborate hoax, cooked up by Brooklyn boosters and NPR affiliates to ruin my weekend.

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5 comments

Nov 25, 2009

Sara rated it:

bookshelves: 2009

Read in November, 2009

Although I'll retain plenty of the lurid details from The Extra Man, I just about had an attack when I read the line "showered and blue-blazered" — appropriated for the unbelievably fantastic song "Mistaken for Strangers," by The National. Lead singer Matt Berninger later misattributed the quote as appearing in Ames'Wake Up, Sir!, which seems strange; how does one like a string of words enough to steal it and then forget where it's from?

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Sep 16, 2009

Jgknobler rated it:

Read in September, 2009

A very peculiar but entertaining book written with wonderful freshness and candor. Written in the first person, the protagonist is a young man with an interest in transexuals and a sexual need to cross-dress. He moves in with an older, impoverished, eccentric man who schools him in the ways of crashing operas and society functions and taking advantage of lonely, wealthy women. There is an abundance of fascination with the grotesque and pathetic, but also a strangely powerful treatment of issues ...more

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Aug 04, 2009

Elaine rated it:

Read in August, 2009

Perfect for a fun read. Brilliantly drawn characters, fleshed out so that they are real humans, not "types" or "character" although they are eccentric or even weird. The writing is bright and witty, but still allows one to empathize with Louis' loneliness, longings, and occasional sadness. Parental warning: X-rated for revealed body part, sex with fluids, trannies & cross-dressers, but never salacious, and never gratuitous (if there is sex, it reveals something about the cha...more

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Aug 24, 2009

Sabra Embury rated it:

Read in August, 2009

From the onset of "the Extra Man" I didn't know what to expect. I'd heard of Jonathan Ames's writing being filled with scatological, perverted, self-defacing, yet charming, humor, but I assumed that was mostly in his non fiction essays. Haha...wrong.

"The Extra Man" is about a sweet mid-twenties guy named Louis Ives, who gets let go from his teaching position in Jersey due to curious incident with a bra in a gym bag, mixed with terrible bystander timing.

...more

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May 12, 2008

Kris rated it:

bookshelves: bookblog

Well, I thought I loved Wake Up, Sir! last week, but this Ames novel has taken the cake. It's ending was far more satisfying and the entire thing much more complex and novely. Novel-ish?

If you'll recall, I was intrigued while reading the last book because the novelist/narrator was working on another book, which sounded a lot like this one. And I thought to myself, "Whoa... meta..." No, seriously, I thought to myself - damn I like this book a lot, but the book he's writing i...more Well, I thought I loved Wake Up, Sir! last week, but this Ames novel has taken the cake. It's ending was far more satisfying and the entire thing much more complex and novely. Novel-ish?

If you'll recall, I was intrigued while reading the last book because the novelist/narrator was working on another book, which sounded a lot like this one. And I thought to myself, "Whoa... meta..." No, seriously, I thought to myself - damn I like this book a lot, but the book he's writing in this book sounds even better. And it is. I feel strange reviewing these in reverse - as I'm nearly certain that this one came out first. But I think maybe this way is best - I feel the last book would have been a let-down after this one. In reverse, however, it's a unexpected new plateau.

The Extra Man is about Louis Ives, who moves to New York City in the early 90s when he is fired from his job at a Princeton boarding school for stealing a co-worker's bra and trying it on in the teacher's lounge. Yes, Louis is plagued by the same lack of self-control as Alan (from Wake Up, Sir!) but here it is women's clothing and not alcohol that he cannot seem to resist. He decides to venture to New York City based entirely on reading Washington Square (fellow IFP 1 surviors will appreciate the frustration I felt here). Louis comes out very early on to declare that he aspires to be a "young gentleman" of the F. Scott Fitzgerald variety, and so wears a tie-and-jacket everywhere, tries to establish "routines" so people around town will know him as a creature of habit, and while riding the NJ Transit train home from his first visit to New York, imagines he is just coming back from a fine time at his "club" - an experience which I now endeavor to mimic myself at the earliest possible convenience. And he reads Wilde, Wodehouse, Waugh, Mann, and Maum (a reading list you may soon see repeated here).

Soon he moves in with Henry Harrison, an older man who lists a desire for a roommate in The Village Voice and Ives quickly scores the low-rent occupancy in what amounts to a tiny, cluttered roach motel on the very upper edge of the Upper East Side. Harrison is, in many ways, the aging gentleman to Ives's young and he makes a Don Quixote/Sancho Panza comparison very early on. He is a playwright who teaches community college classes and lives in total squalor. Most of his plays have been lost or misplaced in the dense jungle of the apartment, which is filled with dirty cups (some of which he declares off limits, because they may have been peed in), books and records (to which he dances), bowls full of Christmas ornaments, and of course, roaches (and later fleas). Harrison's real life surrounds being an "extra man," that is, a companion to the rich, elderly women of Manhattan, who throw dinner parties and need men to balance the guest-list (because the old men die sooner) or escorts to Broadway, the Met, or the museums. Harrison and Ives both have a taste for all these finer things, though their lives are a constant absurd battle with their self-destructing cars, vermin, and awkward living arrangements. There are moments of true tenderness between them - something strangely between father-and-son and roommates. I won't spoil those, but I will give an early example of the absurd Henry Harrison in action.

"'Do you like Fitzgerald?' I asked... 'Of course,' he said, "His prose is like cocktail music. But there won't be any more Fitzgeralds. You need an all-male environment... the Muslims might produce a Fitzgerald. They're good at separating the sexes.' I imagined for a moment a new type of The Great Gatsby, written in Arabic and making a great sensation over here.

Eventually you find out how he does his laundry (wearing his clothes into the shower and stamping on them on the bottom of the tub) and why he flushes before he finishes urinating (he gets bored waiting for it to be over). It's hard, looking through now, to sum up Harrison well in just little quotes and things - but that's what makes him such a fantastic character and why Ives is so amazed by him - you simply never know what he will do next but it is always believ

The book also follows along with Ives's dirty little secret, that is his sexual confusions that caused him to try on the bra back in Princeton. He begins to respond to ads in the Post for women that spank him, and eventually frequents a transsexual bar in Midtown. His confusions lead to many squirm-inducing adventures as he tries to pin down what he wants and why and how, by going home with a number of the women-that-were-once-men. As in Wake Up Sir I felt that Ames is so sensitive and honest about these encounters and curiosities that Ives is always sympathetic, even when being spanked by a sexagenarian. In grad school I was forced to workshop an endless number of stories written by the other guys that were basically just attempts to out-gross-out the others... stories about having sex with amputees and little girls and animals were somehow considered worthy of serious discussion... but I digress... the thing that always bugged me about those scenarios and stories were they were written solely to disgust, never to understand. The reader (me) was supposed to be thrilled by how grotesque they were able to be, not by how honest they were bold enough to be. Ames stays in a class by himself because Louis Ives is a genuinely lovable and sympathetic guy - not some Fight Club wanna-be. So as thrown as I was initially by all the transsexuals, I stuck with it, and I'm very very glad I did.

The end of the book, as I mentioned, is very satisfying. I expected, after reading Wake Up Sir that he and Henry would split and he'd flee to live with family in New Jersey, as Alan Blair begins things in WU,S! Instead I was pleasantly surprised to find a more satisfying conclusion in the end. My book, incidentally, came with a Reader's Club Guide, which I find very amusing. I'm imagining a bunch of middle-aged readers having a good time discussing "Regression Spankology" and so forth. But it also included an interview with Ames, who commented on his characters and how they differ from himself and each other. "They're like odd cousins or strange brothers. We share many of the same qualities, but they are very much their own persons."

Anyway, highly recommended. I'm sad that there's very little of Ames left for me to read now... but I may move on to the books he listed Ives as reading all the time (the few I haven't read already...)
(less)

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Dec 08, 2008

Jennifer rated it:

bookshelves: didn-t-finish

Read in December, 2008

I picked this up read the first few pages - and lost interest.

Tried again the next day. Picked it up - read the first few pages - and got distracted by something else. Put the book down.

Came back another time, read the first few pages, but didn't get any further.

After a bunch of tries, I just couldn't read it. It failed to capture my interest enough to get me past the first few pages... which is disappointing, because I thought I might like the book if I co...more

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Dec 01, 2008

Cyn rated it:

I really wanted to give this 3.5 stars but I can't, that said this book was thoroughly enjoyable despite the fact that the main character is an annoying eccentric. It seems like a lot of reviewers read "Wake up, Sir" first, I read this first and am now reading "Wake up, Sir" so the meta references in WUS are meaningful to me. In any event this is a fun read though a bit gritty, the characters are well developed and never dull.

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Sep 07, 2009

Liz rated it:

Read in September, 2009

Good thing Half-Price books was having a 20% off sale on Saturday, cuz my book buying addiction is getting serious... Just started this one today, and am half way done... Why do I find his wacky characters so appealing? Cluttered tiny Upper Eastside apt shared by 2 eccentrics. Transvestite bars. Guilt-ridden sexual escapades. Flying stuffed animal lions falling from the sky. My new favorite phrase: "curious maladjustment". Is Jonathan Ames straight and single? haha.

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Jan 06, 2009

Abby rated it:

bookshelves: fiction

Read in January, 1999

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Nov 30, 2008

Ara rated it:

It's about Louis Ives and he's a closet deviant, but the complexity of his needs slowly dawns on the reader as the story continues. The comedy of the situation is that Louis wants to be a gentleman, in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he makes an effort every chance he gets to behave that way. While Louis fights within himself over his deviance, his roommate, Henry Harrison, provides the outright ridiculous dialogue that makes the book pure gold. The prose in both the descriptions and dia...more

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Jan 04, 2009

Vance rated it:

Read in January, 2009

An old man in a dirty apartment and a virtuous younger man who has an obsession with trannies. It's a "coming out"-style book that never once descends into the bathos that often mars this sub-genre of bildungsroman. It's got charm and a narrator who makes you easily and unashamedly understand that he can be a nice boy and a live an edgy life at the same time -- with no regrets.

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Nov 21, 2008

Murasaki_neko rated it:

bookshelves: bookclubs

Read in November, 2008

This was a fun book to read. I'm not sure why, since the main character was strange and irritating, but the story was very well crafted and the characters were believable in their idiosyncrasies. I would definitely recommend it, but readers must keep an open mind, as it gets into the world of cross dressing and transsexuals.

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Mar 02, 2010

Stefan rated it:

Read in January, 2008

It's hard to find a book that makes me laugh out loud, it's hard to find a book that when I reach near end, I don't want it to. At times you can be critical. I enjoyed this more than any Steven King novel. Ames ignores his reputation and has proceeded to humour me again and again.

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Apr 14, 2009

Heather rated it:

Read in March, 2009

The two main characters were definitely interesting and very funny. I'm giving it three stars for that. The overall plot I might give it just two stars. Yes it made me laugh but I think it went in circles too much, repeating the same things just under slightly different circumstances.

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Jun 13, 2008

Stewart rated it:

Read in November, 2008

Having loved Ames' brilliant comedic novel Wake Up Sir, I was very interested in checking out his back catalogue. The Extra Man does not reach the same hilarious heights as Wake Up Sir, but it is an amusing, enjoyable reading experience nevertheless. Ames has a tremendous knack for being able to place mad cap characters in rather traditional settings and portray the wonderfully quirky results in convincing fashion. In Louis and Henry, Ames molds truly memorable characters who, for all of thei...more

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