I Pass Like Night - Hardcover

Ames, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688078044 ISBN 13: 9780688078041

Publisher: William Morrow & Co, 1989

Synopsis

Alexander Vine abandons his ideals of education and achievement and sets a course for self-destruction, hoping to somehow find real love in a series of debauches on New York's Lower East Side

About this title

Review

Joyce Carol Oates Disturbing and funny...a striking debut.

Vanity Fair Jonathan Ames's acclaimed fictional odyssey inside New York City's sexual underground is the first novel from this arresting and original writer. Bleakly funny, fiercely moving, this starkly rendered chronicle of a young man's secret life is both unforgettable and "unabashedly shocking."

Philip Roth An authentic voice of youthful suffering. Mr. Ames's antisocial young hero comes through as a cross between Jean Genet and Holden Caulfield in the age of AIDS. The style is the real achievement: strong, clean, and poker-faced.

Joyce Carol Oates Cinematic in its short, graphic takes, chilling in its authority....A disturbing and often funny portrait of a man without illusions.

USA Today Evokes the lean style of Raymond Carver.

Kirkus Reviews Impressive...Ames set[s] down haunting urban scenes in a spare style that works like poetry.

Time Out London Unerringly builds up an accurate portrait of a dissolute young man floundering in a sea of amorality.

The Times Literary Supplement London This is New York at street level. Ames is something of a gambler [but he] negotiates the pitfalls with remarkable dexterity....There is an unforced sadness at the heart of this novel, and there lies the proof that the gamble has succeeded.

Dallas Morning News Crazy, frightening, poignant, funny encounters...utterly fearless in its unsentimental depiction of a young man courting self-destruction.

Booklist Ames makes [Alexander Vine] as horrifying an emblem of American young manhood as the coke-snorters of Bright Lights, Big City and Less Than Zero.

From the Back Cover

Jonathan Ames's acclaimed fictional odyssey inside New York City's sexual underground is the first novel from this arresting and original writer. Bleakly funny, fiercely moving, this starkly rendered chronicle of a young man's secret life is both unforgettable and "unabashedly shocking" (Vanity Fair).

When Alexander Vine finishes his work day, he leaves his post as a doorman at Manhattan's exclusive Four Seasons restaurant -- and enters a nighttime landscape of chance and danger, excitement and reinvention in the city's erotic underworld. Walking a tightrope between sexual desire and self-extinction, Alexander Vine charts his destructive course -- and his struggle for redemption -- with startling, unadorned clarity.

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow & Co
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0688078044
• ISBN 13: 9780688078041
• Binding: Hardcover