26 CHICAGO READER | FEBRUARY 3, 2006 | SECTION ONE
Books
I LOVE YOU MORE THAN YOU KNOW JONATHAN AMES (GROVE/BLACK CAT)
Jonathan Ames Looks
Deep Into His Heart
Not to mention his bowels.
By Susannah J. Felts
E
arly on in Jonathan Ames’s
entertaining new collection
of personal essays he settles
in for a bath, blows his nose, and
lets what comes out—“an interesting sculpture . . . with some dark
blood in it”—swish around in the
bathwater with him. This is
apparently a habit. “I try to keep
an eye out for the mucus, to make
sure it doesn’t get tangled in my
leg hair,” he writes, “but usually it
just disappears and then I try to
forget about the whole thing.” But
this time he suddenly realizes that
what he assumes is the snot blob
is actually a drowning cockroach.
He goes ape shit.
Ames is disgusted by lots of
things—the wart on his cock, the
itch in his ass, a giant zit that
oozes in the night, his cruddy
toothbrush, his irritable bowel
syndrome, his nose picking. I
Love You More Than You Know
chronicles those and other bodily,
emotional, and material failings
in unaffected comic prose. “I am
thirty-eight years old,” he writes.
“I wear a backpack and have no
savings. I console myself with the
thought that people live longer
nowadays so it makes sense that
some of us take longer to mature.”
The act of exposing his many
small humiliations and existential
fears itself provides more fodder.
“I should sue myself for libel,” he
writes. “Girls may want to meet
me, but no one actually takes my
writing seriously. My whole oeuvre has become one big dysfunctional personal ad.”
Like David Sedaris, to whom
comparisons are frequent and
justified, Ames calibrates his
work for today’s casual reader:
each self-deprecating essay is
supershort, may include some
gross-out humor, and requires
no intellectual work on the reader’s part. Like his other essay collections, What’s Not to Love? and
My Less Than Secret Life (he’s
also written three novels), this
book is perfect for a train commute or short flight.
Ames, who’s also known for his
comic stage performances, seems
poised to attain Sedaris-esque
success as a pop essayist, but like
David Rakoff, who’s also constantly compared to Sedaris, he’s
got his own thing going. Sedaris
often turns to his imagination in
his finer moments—his hilarious,
horrifying visions of what could
happen. Ames traffics exclusively
in observations about what is,
whether freaky or banal. He’s frequently sexually explicit, ensuring a narrower audience. My
parents and I can laugh together
at Sedaris’s dispatches from
Paris, but we’d have a harder
time sharing “Rue St. Denis” (in
which Ames nearly fails to fuck a
middle-aged French prostitute),
“No Contact, Asshole!” (about
stealing away from a visit with
his parents and young son in
suburban New Jersey for an S-M
session), or “Whores, Writers,
and a Pimple:
My Trip to
“Hot and
Europe” (selfBothered: An
Evening in Bed” explanatory).
The sexual
with Jonathan
dalliances are
Ames, Neal
amusing at
Pollack, and
first, but they
Lynn Harris
swiftly wear
WHEN Wed 2/8,
thin. There’s
7 PM
WHERE Abbey Pub, only so much
mileage you
3420 W. Grace
can get out of
PRICE $8
INFO 312-747-4074, cheap sex, the
self-hatred it
nextbook.org
brings, and
boy-and-his-toy talk. More compelling is Ames’s willingness to
occasionally drop the hip trou of
comic candor and flash the other
tender parts. He offers this reflection: “Inside my head, behind my
eyes and beneath my bald dome,
is a lingering, mild depression,
which causes me to procrastinate
and not do simple tasks like
cleaning my reading glasses or to
begin important tasks like writing my version of War and Peace.
Generally speaking, my depression manifests itself as this feeling of subtle displacement from
my life. Everything seems to be
rushing by, and I’m floating
above it all, reaching my hand
out to life, but not quite grasping
it, like waving your hand for a
taxi that is clearly occupied.”
Here and elsewhere, in essays
stocked with stand-up quips, he’s
putting to use the advice teachers
of personal-essay writing are forever giving students: don’t be
afraid to be vulnerable, to write
about your own foibles and fears
openly. But talking candidly about
your depressive self-loathing can
make readers squirm, so it’s a bit
of a commercial risk. (This might
be part of Sedaris’s appeal: he
rarely plumbs emotional depths.)
Ames manages to keep readers
comfortable because his displays
CHICAGO READER | FEBRUARY 3, 2006 | SECTION ONE 27
Ink Well
by Ben Tausig
Word Botching
of vulnerability ultimately serve to
make us laugh. Almost anyone
can relate to his witty explorations
of, as he puts it, “how humiliating
it is to have a body.” His take on
being periodically broke, drunkenly enraged, and shadowed by
the black dog can be great, validating fun—you get the urge to
fire up the blog and confess. Not
surprisingly, Ames says he gets
earfuls of unsolicited secrets from
his readers.
Then again, some may find his
comic-depressive persona disingenuous, particularly post-Frey.
After all, Ames graduated from
Princeton, has written six books,
is just over 40, and quit drinking
some years ago. For a guy fixated
on failure, he’s nearly a poster
boy for success.
A handful of pieces in I Love
You More Than You Know,
including the title essay, about
Ames’s visit with his beloved
Aunt Doris, are downright sentimental, even saccharine—the
last thing you’d expect from a
contemporary humorist. They’re
hardly representative, but they
persuaded me that his neurosis is
authentic, that behind the
humor lie genuine sincerity and
an embattled heart. v
ACROSS
1. Noted OCD sufferer Summers
5. Pizzeria owner in Do the Right Thing
8. Burn dinner, say
14. Uptight, slangily
15. First mate
16. Saffron-seasoned Spanish staple
17. To for too, e.g.
18. Determine the age of wheat?
20. Like a long shot
22. March Madness org.
23. Once again part of an athletic clique?
28. Trials end when they’re hung
29. Shock’s partner
30. Valhalla war god
31. Derby dude
34. Graffiti, to some
37. Brink
38. Reverend whose name is linked to
phrases like 18-, 23-, 47-, and 54Across
40. Not many
41. Keystone officer
42. Part of an alien abduction story, often
43. Rehearsal assistance
LAST WEEK: LIFE LESSON
44.
45.
47.
52.
53.
54.
57.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
Compete
Annoying person to sleep with
Tearjerker?
Like some ale
“Groovy!”
Shampooer’s concern?
Return of the Jedi critter
With a full deck, so to speak
DLX over X
Hit on the head
Psychedelic coloration
Yokohama unit
Hit song feature
DOWN
1. Yoga spot
2. Whichever
3. The Game’s game
4. Punch one’s time card
5. Family cars
6. ______-garde
7. Creep, slangily
8. Low stat for most SUVs
9. You can lend it or bend it
10. Hand-holding, spirit-raising gettogether
11. Like a con man
12. Forearm bones
13. Que ______?
19. Spot on a spud
21. Step on it
23. Eclectic Icelandic songstress
24. Sound track
25. Inhibit
26. Gyllenhaal of Jarhead
27. Indebted individual
31. Hiccup-fighting word
32. Soft toss
33. Half and half
34. Lit
35. She walked away in a 1966 single
36.
38.
39.
43.
44.
45.
46.
Pip-squeak
Roast rod
Paper or plastic, e.g.: abbr.
Simply engineered
Saw, as a movie
Escort through the door
Krautrock band with a modernsounding name
47. Iranian faith
48. Unescorted
49.
50.
51.
52.
55.
56.
58.
59.
60.
Unactivated
Gather, as the troops
Treasure cache
Attention getter
TV Tarzan Ron
Deli bread
Court
1969 bed-in participant
Grp.. whose parades often draw
more protesters than participants