I Pass Like Night

Jonathan Ames
1989
Rating: 5

I mostly enjoyed Jonathan Ames’s first novel, I Pass Like Night, which he published in 1989 around the age of 25. It’s the first and only book of his that I’ve read. I’ve heard from a writer whose opinion I trust that Wake Up Sir is very good, and I’m guessing better than I Pass, which is set in 1983 and concerns itself with the sexual exploits of Alexander Vine, a casually racist door man at the Four Seasons who lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and is bi-sexual.

(Don’t know that a disclosure is necessary, but I fraternized on a few occasions with Ames socially while helping to coordinate a performance art event — sheesh, I guess in the early 2000’s.)

I came out of the book thinking that it’s solid work, especially for someone that young. Ames exhibits a confidence and aptitude with his material. The writing occasionally sparkled, and it seemed to point to bigger and brighter work ahead, which is what happened.

I Pass is at its best when it describes the relationship between Alexander and his childhood pal, Ethan. The climax of that relationship, which plays out across two pages, was superb, and those two pages alone arguably justify reading the book. It was poignant, surprising, and it felt true.

The novel is also consistently amusing and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. I particularly liked the use of “fuck-fingers.”

If Ames’s debut was fun and periodically inspired, it was also underdeveloped. I Pass is short, 167 pages (which in fact is one of the reasons I read it, the lock-down has wrecked my attention span). I am a fan of brevity, but I think in this case the book suffered for it.

There’s nothing wrong with a loosey-goosey, picaresque novel, of course, but even picaresque novels need to congeal in a way that I Pass does not. Some of the characters and encounters felt extraneous or unmoored.

Starting with Alexander’s girlfriend/fuck-buddy, a bartender named Joy. She appears maybe five times in the book, always very fleetingly, and the pattern is that Alexander is emotionally and verbally abusive to her. There’s no arc, or there’s a very clumsy and off-putting arc: he’s a total dick to her.

Which brings us to the second set of problems with the book: its problematic identity politics. To caveat, Ames wrote it when he was 25, in the late 80s. If I had written a novel at that age at that time I would not have handled race or gender the way I’d handle it today. I’m not saying we have to whip out the Cancel Gun.

The cruelty Alexander displays toward Joy, a victim of toxic shock syndrome linked to her use of an IUD, is hard to understand. He makes awful, misogynistic comments about his previous girlfriends too. I’m not sure what the point was, or how the book is better for Alexander’s sexism.

Alexander is cruel to the other person he’s friendly with in the story, a guy he cruises for prostitutes with, so the cruelty is not completely gendered. If the point was to illustrate how the various psychic wounds Alexander sustained affected him, these episodes seemed ad hoc rather than organic.

I Pass was also a bit cringe-inducing in its treatment of race. Aside from a one-sentence mention of black mothers toward the end of the book, all of the black characters in it are either crooks or prostitutes, “whores,” actually. Alexander likens black prostitutes in the beginning of the book to animals in a jungle …

“the great jungle cats of the Tarzan books I had read when I was young. These cats, Numa the lion and Sheeta the leopard knew every creature that passed through the forest and knew what it would do.”

There was another tone-deaf passage later in the book:

“There are more homeless than ever, but the Bowery bum, the white, blue-collar alcoholic, who served in WWII or Korea, is going extinct. The ones that are left, the Jimmy Warren’s, the J. B. Britten’s, have little orange hospital tags on their wrists; they are like marked precious birds in a sanctuary.”

The implication in the passage is that those bums matter more because they are white.

A gay Latino man is portrayed as a predator who promises to use a condom while having sex with Alexander but then goes bareback.

Writers, irrespective of their race, need the artistic freedom to create racist characters and to be able to explore racism in their work. What’s not appropriate is to toss some racist characters into a story, ask your reader to identify with them on some level, and to then say nothing substantive about race. The black characters in I Pass conform to negative stereotypes, and the author’s perspective seemingly aligns with the racist character’s.

There might be a fig-leaf here, in that one of Vine’s older relatives refers to “schwarzes,” a racist yiddish term for black people. So, Ames’s idea is maybe to highlight the social origins of racist attitudes.

But my sense is that this is just casual racism.

Pedophilia and incest are also themes in the book; Vine’s father walks up to or else crosses the sexual assault line with his son, and Alexander is preyed on by an adult camp counselor as well. These themes also felt like they needed to be developed more. I suppose Ames (maybe?) suggests that some of Alexander’s struggles as an adult are tied to these assaults, but the book’s treatment of them is casual and off-handed, and I don’t think that was to the story’s benefit.