| |
The Extra Man
by Jonathan Ames
|
| Edition: Hardcover |
| ISBN: 140286776X |
|
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group (July 1998)
|
|
Dimensions :
|
Average Customer Review: 
|
Synopsis : Young Louis Ives, recently fired from his teaching position for cross-dressing, moves to New York City on a whim and finds himself rooming with a flamboyant, eccentric playwright. Ames's hilarious novel follows the pair to art openings, where they pig out on free food, and transvestite bars, where Louis's obsessions are rekindled.
|
Description : From the Publisher
Louis Ives, the narrator of The Extra Man, fancies himself a young gentleman fashioned after his heroes in the books of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He dresses the part - favoring neckties, blue blazers, and sport coats. But he also has a penchant for women's clothing, a weakness that causes him to lose his job as a teacher at a Princeton day school after a bizarre incident involving a colleague's brassiere. Thrust out of Princeton, he heads to New York where he rents a cheap room in the madly discombobulated apartment of Henry Harrison, a failed but brilliant playwright who dances alone to Ethel Merman records, sneaks into Broadway shows, and performs with great style the duties of a walker - an escort for the rich widows of the Upper East Side. The two men, separated in age by more than forty years, develop a relationship that is irascible mentor and eager apprentice, and they form a bond the depths of which neither expected. But Louis, when he's not with Henry, has fascinations that lead him to an unusual community on the fringes of the sex world of Times Square. He develops a secret life there, which he fears will be his undoing and which he must keep hidden from Henry at all costs.
|
Review : Publisher's Weekly
When he comes to New York City, having been fired from his job at a Princeton prep school, Louis Ives, the confused young hero of Ames's comic new novel, finds that his first challenge is the search for an affordable apartment and an acceptable roommate. He gets more than he bargained for with a cozily squalid place on the Upper East Side and the man with whom he shares it, Henry Harrison. Henry is a dedicated eccentric, unsuccessful playwright, gentleman freeloader and ageless senior citizen whose vocation is escorting elderly rich women as an 'extra man.' As Henry introduces him to some peculiar delights of city living -- how to sneak into Broadway plays and piss in the street unnoticed -- Ives begins to indulge the sexual fixations, notably cross-dressing, that got him into trouble in the first place. Ames balances Henry's arch if not camp lifestyle, peppered throughout with Noel Cowardish observations, with Ives' tentative exploration of New York's transvestite underworld. As the drag queen hostess at Ives' favorite bar puts it to him, 'You're not really straight, but you're not really gay. You're straightish.' Ives, however, continues to push his sexual ambivalence, until his 'tranny-chasing' inevitably threatens his friendship with his outlandish roommate. Unlike Ames's moody debut about sleazy New York (I Pass Like Night), this narrative maintains its sense of humor even in the most straightened, kinky or depressing circumstances. If the resolution is a bit mechanical, the novel's comic atmosphere is otherwise admirably sustained.
|
|
