The Extra Man

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.

Ames's The Extra Man is delightful, addictive, hilarious, and surprisingly touching. It made me laugh out loud again and again, and even left me teary-eyed once. Loius Ives is a character one can really feel for, while Henry Harrison is a figure one would love to meet, and the relationship between the two of them (and Ives's relationship to women and to himself) is interesting and moving. Ames pulls the whole thing off with nary a hitch; this is the kind of book one could easily read in a single sitting.

"The Extra Man" is Ames' follow-up to his debut novel, "I Pass Like Night," which covers some of the same territory, but is not as detailed as this. Here, Louis Ives, a sexually confused school teacher, is fired from his job following a comic encounter with a female colleague's bra. Determined to start life anew, he moves to NYC into the claustrophobic, roach-infested sty of an apartment with Henry Harrison, a misanthropic elder who makes his way through life as a gentleman escort for woman in high society. While in New York, Louis succumbs to the temptations and mystique of transvestite hookers in seamy Times Square, all the while cultivating his relationship with Henry, who serves so very well as the father figure Louis has always craved. "The Extra Man" is eminently accessible, and filled with honest, frenetic, and ribald writing reminiscent of Philip Roth and Paul Rudnick. I've never read a novel quite like this.Throughout, I rooted for both Louis and Henry, who became, for me, the quintessentail post-modern "odd couple." "The Extra Man" is as touching as it is funny.

This is a great work. Ames' problem is that he is simply too funny and too good a craftsman to be appreciated by the foolish likes of a Michiko Kakutani. The book makes you laugh, so it can't be "important." The Extra Man also features one of the most unusual coming-of-age epiphanies ever written. (Cross-dressing in Bay Ridge ....) Just behind Operation Shylock as the most enjoyable novel I've read published in this decade.