The Book Review

Famous Ames

But the book’s charm is in its insistent self-referential lunacy, its friction between literary fantasy and lowly appetites. Blair asks Jeeves whether his work-in-progress “should at least have a fistfight, don’t you think, like in Dashiell Hammett”; a few chapters later he has a fistfight himself, shortly after indulging in more Hammett (and several pitchers of beer). Wielding preemptive irony like a blunter, more frankly libidinal Dave Eggers, Ames seems to be exorcising his own fear that he’s every bit the hack that Blair is. But then, so is every writer, and Blair’s shamelessness is a window onto Ames’s endearing honesty. For Blair, writing is theft; writing is wish fulfillment (“I’d like to have an outer-body experience. Maybe the character based on me could have one” is a typical note-to-self); writing is ventriloquism (Blair keeps a list of ramblings to assign randomly to his characters). At its worst, writing is lazy and useless, but its truthfulness can be redemptive. “People don’t expect too much from literature,” Blair tells Jeeves in full-on wise-fool mode. “They just want to know they’re not alone with being confused.”

Most important for Ames, the book is a comedy—written by someone who’s cast aside the beginner’s brooding and blocks. “For my first book, I was influenced by Last Exit to Brooklyn and Raymond Carver,” says Ames. “But later I was really into A Confederacy of Dunces and Oscar Wilde. I got into funny books.”

Nothing short of a Sedaris-style miracle, though, would rescue him from an even more common writerly hardship—the plight of the unsold mid-list novelist. Ames’s books sell respectably, but his relative obscurity becomes all too apparent every time he enters a bookstore. That’s where the cable show comes in. “It’s easy to romanticize the poverty, but at a certain point it gets kind of boring,” says Eric Bogosian, whose writing Ames performed at P.S. 122 last year. “He’s 40, he’s got books all over, and he can barely make ends meet. He’s looking for a way to relieve himself of that situation, and that’s understandable.”

“I’m my own worst publicist,” Ames says. “One thing that has upset me over the years is that I subtitled What’s Not to Love? ‘The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer.’ Every time now in the papers, it’s like, ‘Pervert, pervert, pervert.’ What was I thinking?! I should have associated my name with the word genius, like Dave Eggers.”

“Nothing short of a Sedaris-style mirac le could rescue him from that writerly hardship—the plight of the unsold mid-list novelist.”

How does a cult star become a marketable character? Ames, ever conscious of his persona, seems to be toning it down. A couple of years ago, he stopped writing about his polymorphously perverse friend Patrick Bucklew, an alter ego of sorts with a prosthetic leg, after his editor at the New York Press told him that “Patrick’s stump is becoming your crutch.” But finally, it all comes down to Ames’s image. “Jonathan goes marching boldly into this territory called Jonathanworld,” says Bogosian, “and if it does work—if he can pull us into Jonathanworld and make it so compelling that we don’t know how we ever lived without it—then it becomes something like Larry David.”

Ames seems resigned about the issue of selling out. “You’re just going to get old at some point,” he says. “You were kind of hip and a discovered treasure, and then at some point, everybody finds out about you and nobody reads you. I didn’t read David Sedaris because he was a best-seller. I finally picked up a book of his, and it was great. If you get a backlash, that means you get some money in the bank. I’m into flogging—no, I’m not. But I’ll accept the backlash when it comes.”

By which he means, if it comes. “It’s been almost a whole year from a pitch to a green light,” Ames says of the TV-pilot-making process—with his series still a distant possibility. “Sort of the way Fitzgerald had the green light at the end of the Long Island Sound in Gatsby. This is the green light from Hollywood—I see the green light!”