New York Observer
The Extra Man wins us over with its sheer energy and good will, its confidence in the ability of its own humor and intelligence to widen our ideas about the possibilities of love.
Stephanie Zacharek
[A] sure-footed exploration of sexual confusion and a . . .surprisingly moving urban comedy of manners. . . .Louis may feel as awkward as Milton Berle in dragbut inside he's really Fred Astaire — he just doesn't know it yet. —The New York Times Book Review
San Francisco Chronicle
An endearing, entertaining story. . .a comic-erotic novel.
Publishers Weekly
When he comes to New York City, having been fired from his job at a Princeton prep school, Louis Ives, the confused young hero of Ames's comic new novel, finds that his first challenge is the search for an affordable apartment and an acceptable roommate. He gets more than he bargained for with a cozily squalid place on the Upper East Side and the man with whom he shares it, Henry Harrison. Henry is a dedicated eccentric, unsuccessful playwright, gentleman freeloader and ageless senior citizen whose vocation is escorting elderly rich women as an 'extra man.' As Henry introduces him to some peculiar delights of city living -- how to sneak into Broadway plays and piss in the street unnoticed -- Ives begins to indulge the sexual fixations, notably cross-dressing, that got him into trouble in the first place. Ames balances Henry's arch if not camp lifestyle, peppered throughout with Noel Cowardish observations, with Ives' tentative exploration of New York's transvestite underworld. As the drag queen hostess at Ives' favorite bar puts it to him, 'You're not really straight, but you're not really gay. You're straightish.' Ives, however, continues to push his sexual ambivalence, until his 'tranny-chasing' inevitably threatens his friendship with his outlandish roommate. Unlike Ames's moody debut about sleazy New York (I Pass Like Night), this narrative maintains its sense of humor even in the most straightened, kinky or depressing circumstances. If the resolution is a bit mechanical, the novel's comic atmosphere is otherwise admirably sustained.
The New York Observer
The Extra Man wins us over with its sheer energy and good will, its confidence in the ability of its own humor and intelligence to widen our ideas about the possibilities of love.
Kirkus Reviews
Ames follows I Pass Like Night with a gentle account of a burgeoning friendship between two likable oddballs. When 25-year-old Louis loses his teaching job at a Princeton day school after the principal's wife catches him trying on a colleague's bra, he decides on impulse to move to New York City. He answers an ad seeking a roommate and thus meets Henry Harrison, a putative writer, well on in years, who dyes his hair with mascara and spends his mealtimes being taken around town by wealthy ladies. Henry's apartment is cramped, and flooded with evocative smells, but Louis responds to his new acquaintance's eccentricity and the whiff of irony that accompanies his extreme opinions: he agrees to move in. Louis looks on in wide-eyed wonder as Henry sleeps till noon, keeps in shape by dancing to Cole Porter records, washes his clothes in the shower, and seems not to mind that the plays he's written are lost in the chaos of the apartment. Louis himself gets a pleasant enough job working at an environmental journal. He lusts after Mary, a female co-worker, but also hangs out at a transvestite club, where he occasionally pays beautiful youngsters for 'dates' more memorable for his partners' vulnerabilities than for the awkward sex. As Henry comes to trust and like him, he teaches Louis his tricks for doing Manhattan on the ultracheap: they sneak into shows after intermission, eat their fill at art openings, and enjoy some memorable binges with Henry's hard-partying coterie of widowed ladies. Henry's unpredictability and benign theatricality make these outings hum, but Louis is also winning on his own terms, upfront about his hunger to be liked, unfazed by squalor, endlesslyappreciative of Henry's spirit and kindness. The sexual-confusion subplot is murky and entirely lacking in resolution, but who cares? It's just plain fun to watch these quasi-misfits fall for each other.
