The Extra Man

Title: The Extra Man
Author: Jonathan Ames
Published: 1999 by Scribner.
Genre: Aww.
Pages:333


 Louis Ives is a young teacher in New Jersey who wants to both be a young gentleman and to wear women's clothes every now and again. He is relieved of his job when he is caught wearing a colleague's bra. Not knowing what else to do, Louis finds a room for rent in New York and moves to the big city to start a new life. His roommate is an aging writer called Henry Harrison, who moonlights as an extra man, a kind of a date to elderly rich ladies who pay for his company with food.

The big city and its wonders soon start to drag Louis off the straight and narrow, to transvestite bars and their beds. A second life which no one, least of all Henry, can find out about.

Despite all these potentially very seedy elements, The Extra Man is a very sweet book. Both Louis and Henry are intereting characters, as is their very messy apartment with letters in the fridge and cockroaches in bed. Oh, there's apparently a movie made of the book, but it hasn't gotten very good reviews. Might check it out anyway one day. As a book, I really liked this one. I was reading two other books at the same time, and all three were equally interesting and hard to put down.

It's a rough life I lead.


   "You want to live with me? Be my husband?" she asked.
   I figured that she was high on what she had snorted and that it was making her feel overly romantic. "I have a very inexpensive room right now," I said, avoiding her proposal. "I don't think I can give it up."
   "If you want to be my husband you have to live with me," she said. I didn't know what to say, so I tried to touch her again and again she pushed my hand away, and then covered her breasts with her top. Here she was proposing that we live together, but I still hadn't touched her.