Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
Reminiscent of John Rechy's The City of Night with its clandestine sexual encounters in a city where everyone is hustling in one way or another, but missing Rechy's rich prose. I loved the stories of the prostitutes best, but while Mr. Ames's prose was almost-powerful and poetic at times, he never quite made it there especially with the interludes in italics. Maybe there was too much of the protagonist pointing out what a despicable character he was in being cruel to Joy (pun intended) and findi...
Ames’ first book with many of the same stories as featured in The Alcoholic. Gritty, gross, but truthful. You wish you could talk sense into Alexander Vine and help him see he doesn’t have to live in the streets and shadows with bums and prostitutes. This isn’t really a novel as much as a series of vignettes about a self-destructive man who loathes his own desires. There is no growth, arc, or resolution, but this is a good read if you want something fast and edgy and, like I said, gross.
3.5 stars.
A bisexual man documents his sordid sexual escapades with rando hookups and prostitutes in ‘80s New York. I Pass Like Night is Jonathan Ames’ first novel and it certainly reads like it! The short, tenuously-connected chapters certainly seem like they were written by someone who doesn’t quite know how to write a novel yet while the content is poorly formed and vaguely in conception. Much of the book reeks of creative-writing classes and thinly-veiled embarrassing autobiography that was better off...
Nearly a decade ago I was talking to a friend about the film Trainspotting, and I wondered how different the book was. She said she loved Irvine Welsh, and lent me his short story collection Acid House. I barely got through it, and returned it with a teeth-clenching 'thanks'. The content bothered me in the same way the Marquis de Sade did more recently. It was not just shock-value perversion, it was aimlessly vile and ugly. I might even call it evil, but not in the puritanical sense, in the huma...
If I'd read this book back in the 90's when I was in my twenties I probably would have liked (but not loved) it. Or maybe it didn't age very well and the charm has disappeared like the neighborhoods this book takes place in.
Solitude in New York City during the generation of AIDS. The underground of sexual depravity and wretched introverts. Porn theaters full of men seeking euphoria no woman will give them, riverside bonfires where bums drink away their rotting insides, sketchy parks where good-natured prostitutes roam look for tricks to turn. The world of Jonathan Ames’ first novel I Pass Like Night is something familiar yet entirely alien, where darkness and perversion are uncorked in an oppressive and overwhelmin...
Ames is one of those oft-overlooked snarky male memoirists that I just can't get enough of. In one of his novels, and I can't remember which one it is, because in my head they're all a big ball of awesome, he just comes right out and says, "BTW, I'm not a dead-beat dad. Here's the situation, and my son and I are actually BFFs". I love that! Because I'm usually the one who stops reading and does math to figure out how old someone was when they had a baby, and why the baby isn't with them now, and...
Self-indulgent and boring. It is as though the author's pleasure lies in making his reader uncomfortable. Worse, he is a storyteller, not a writer. No plot, crisis or resolution follows.
I don't know, I really really want to like Jonathan Ames...I'm committed to liking him. But I didn't love this. Gonna try some more.
I’ve owned this book for a couple decades and just randomly picked it up yesterday. I got it at a gay bookstore in the early 2000s and assumed today that I’d Google it when I finish and find the author died of AIDS in the early 90s. I had absolutely no idea. So even though it was dumped in the “Used - Gay” category at that store, it’s probably not a big shocker to learn it’s ambiguously gay. In that sense, I found it a delightful surprise. It’s essentially a series of very short vignettes. What
Good story, but not something to read if you're depressed or sad. This is not a cheerful tale. Unable to love anyone (except one special person, revealed at the end), Alex finds himself fascinated by female prostitutes, quick gay hook-ups, and possessed with a certain admiration for the drunk and the homeless living in New York City in the late 80s. This is not a novel in the true sense of the word, but more of a collection of vignettes, each one offering a quick glimpse into the void and pain t...
The pure Jonathan Ames stuff in here is visceral, disturbing, and well-crafted, but, since this is his early work, it shares too many similarities with his influences--the lesser (unpopular opinion) authors Hemingway, Kerouac, and, worst of all, Salinger. The structure of this book is a little odd at first, but really resonates by its conclusion. The writing is solid, though, even if it can be graphic at times.
I'm not sure why this has spawned so many (or any) comparisons to Holden Caulfield and Catcher in the Rye; for me, it was reminiscent of Bukowski and William Kennedy, without being as well written as any books I've read by either of those authors. (And if you're sensitive to comma splices, you, too, might be bugged here.) I think the first chapter is the best. Things sort of go gradually downhill after that. But at least the book is extremely short.First line:"I like this one whore on the lower
Probably the best thing about I Pass Like Night is its length. Any longer and I wouldn’t have had the energy or the will to finish Ames’ autobiographical New York Ortonesque sex-addicted sex-athon. I imagine when it was first published, it presumably had enormous shock value. Today it seems all rather tame and dull. Ames repeated his less-is-more formula to better effect with You Were Never Really Here.
A tight, concise book that pulls you along on a dark journey of introspection. Hemingway, Chandler and Carver come to mind as antecedents. An urban psycho-sexual journey of discovery. Immersive and a can't put down read.
A short novel told through vignettes. Like Carver without a filter, a young man navigates the NYC nightlife during the AIDS epidemic. Graphic depictions of grimy sexual encounters both homo and hetero. A how to in how to write a sex scene. It doesn’t have to be tasteful. Great sex seldom is.
I found this on a train, and I kinda regret taking it home with me, because this book is filled with disgusting details about a men's sex life, and I honestly didn't wanna know all of that. The writings style is a little bit bland and the whole book is just depressing.
2.5 Stars.
Like the first draft of a later Jonathan Ames book.