The Alcoholic

If there were a literary genre known as the clever-drunks-behaving-badly novel, Jonathan Ames’s Wake Up, Sir! (2004) would be one of its high points. That book recounts the misadventures of Alan Blair, a neurotic, frequently besotted author who shows up at an artists colony with a freshly broken nose and a case of crabs, then is quickly expelled for attempting to steal a sculpture (he is trying to impress a woman). Alan, who has an imaginary valet named Jeeves, is hilarious, partly because he recounts his sexual obsessions and debauched mishaps with the bemused gentility of a well-mannered Anglophile.

Still, all the drinking in Wake Up, Sir! hinted at a deep sadness. And now, Ames’s latest, The Alcoholic, comes laced with the brittle, soul-scraped-out feeling of a hangover. The book is narrated by one Jonathan A., who starts drinking in high school, goes to rehab after college and spends his twenties and thirties in New York, shifting between semisatisfied sobriety (he becomes a successful detective novelist) and dread-inducing booze-and-coke binges. Dean Haspiel’s black-and-white drawings lend a noirish yet vulnerable look—think The Lost Weekend, only way more emotionally up-front.

We get unadorned descriptions of Jonathan’s longing for his ex-girlfriend, his devastation when his high-school best friend dies of AIDS and his soft spot for transsexuals. Considering the protagonist’s name and how much he looks like Ames, readers will wonder how much of The Alcoholic, which is being billed as a graphic novel, is true. Certainly not all of it (Ames doesn’t write detective novels), but the book possesses a rare honesty. With charismatic awkwardness, Ames nails how odd you can look when you truly study yourself, and captures how much an alcoholic can change in the span between a morning hangover and happy hour. Thankfully, Jonathan A. seems up for the challenges he presents himself. Good thing. Judging from the last frame, which shows him passing a bar on Brooklyn’s Bergen Street, his battles will carry on.

Ames reads Wed 15.

Buy The Alcoholic now on BN.com