Book Reviews

What's Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer

Crown, 288 pp., $23

Jonathan Ames' writing is so informal and chatty, reading his essays in What's Not to Love? is like sitting down with him for coffee, listening with wide eyes and cupped mouth to his bawdy and often embarrassing adventures. And at the end of each story, or even during them, you may find yourself proclaiming that oft-used phrase, "Too much information!" But you'll be laughing when you say it, and secretly hoping he'll give you more.

Culled from Ames' New York Press columns, the personal essays (and I do mean personal) collected in this volume chart the author's sexual adventures from adolescence to adulthood; in the introduction, Ames even calls this collection "a sort of life story," albeit an episodic one with a mostly sexual focus. Author of two previous novels (The Extra Man, I Pass Like Night), Ames writes with witty honesty and deprecating humor, laying all of his humiliations and occasional triumphs right on the table. The effect is both disconcerting and refreshingly frank.

And what stories they are! Ames tells of his late onset of puberty -- at age 16 -- and the resulting fear of public showering that would expose his hairless crotch and penis that was "indistinguishable from that of a five-year-old's." In other essays, he riffs on his baldness, his problem with flatulence during sex, or his Oedipal complex. Then there's his favorite pastime, masturbation, which he explores in essays titled "Insomni-Whack" and "The Shroud of Onan." Ames never met a pun he didn't like. And you can't help but love the attention-grabbing opening lines: "My first sexual experience with a woman was rather old-fashioned: It was with a prostitute," "I've only slept with one post-op transsexual," and, my personal favorite, "The first time I smoked crack was Christmas night 1992."

Of course, due to its outré themes, the collection won't be everyone's cup of tea. Still, the book does have some tender, less sex-soaked moments, especially in the essays Ames writes about the son he fathered with a woman he had slept with once and his journey toward fatherhood. Such stories help round out the collection, saving the book from becoming a bundle of horny anecdotes. But hey, horny anecdotes -- especially ludicrously funny ones, like these -- are fun to read, especially when they're told by the unique and often irresistible Ames. What's not to love, indeed.