Finished Wake Up, Sir! and boy, was it delightful to the very last word. And so delightful the last few chapters that I read it slowly and sometimes more than once because I wanted to be sure not to miss a single word nor a single nuance nor a single chuckle and laugh. I have not laughed so much with a book since I can’t remember when. And I mean belly laughs and out-loud laughs and lots of mirthful chuckling. Ames is marvelous. I enjoyed his earlier book, The Extra Man greatly also. It is touching and warm and offbeat (some good scenes about transvestites and transexuals for the offbeat quotient but mainly about an odd couple friendship between the older man Henry and the young innocent, Louis. The book has lots of humor and goes where many authors fear to tread with great grace and innocence and courage and style. So I was prepared to enjoy myself with Wake Up, Sir! but, as the saying goes, I was not prepared to enjoy myself as much as I did.
The back cover of the paperback has 13 "Hilarious" quotations from newspaper and magazine reviews. Plus some other glowing praise. When you see that you say, No, I’m sorry, but if that many critics have said it is "Hilarious!" you know darn well it cannot possible be that funny. Funny ha-ha maybe it places, but not hilarious. That is just more Reviewing Hype. Recall the back covers of those two novels about Henry James I just read a few weeks ago. They also had all sorts of glowing and heartfelt and beautifully phrased praise all over them. But half-way into each book, you say to yourself, gee, didn’t anyone ever tell this writer back in grad school that writing a novel about a writer is not a good idea, and writing an imaginative, novelized biography of a Famous writer is an especially not good idea. And while you are reading these books, you are sort of holding your breath from chapter to chapter and saying, ok, that wasn’t too bad, I guess I’ll keep going, and Yes, you certainly are showing us that you can pull this off fairly well.
When you are in Jonathan Ames’s hands, to the contrary, you just lean back, relax and let him charm you, entertain you, make you laugh and laugh and laugh. And yes, by the time you are one half to two-thirds of the way through, you are saying to yourself, those reviewers and critics, each one of them, was right, this book is freakin hilarious. Hilarious is the only word, the best word, the word that this book was designed to illustrate—and maybe, now, no other book could ever do so quite so perfectly. And with such good, clean writerly fun about a writer and the writing life and especially about one of those writer-arts foundation colony places you’ve heard of but have scant idea what they could really be like. The McDowell Colony here in southwestern New Hampshire. Yaddo, The Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and other such places. Ames does a gentle satire of what he calls The Rose Colony and of the artsy-writerly life and calling that gets howls of laughter from us while still endearing us to the denizens of Rose we have some come to enjoy. Alan Tinkle, for example. Well, I must stop here but will add some postscripts, perhaps, later on.
