Medium Primitive Cool: My Thoughts On: The Alcoholic, by Jonathan Ames

A couple weeks ago I checked out Jonathan Ames’ graphic novel from last year, The Alcoholic. Ames is the creator of HBO’s Bored To Death, my favourite new show of the 2009/2010 season. I was always curious about the book, what with it landing on so many best-books-of-2008 lists, and its connections to the HBO series only amped up my curiosity even more.

Just like in the show, Ames named the lead character "Jonathan Ames," after himself (which is so odd and cool at the same time. Why does he keep doing this?). But the book feels much more autobiographical than the TV series. A quote inside the book by Neil Gaimen puts it best when describing it as “painfully-honest-even-if-we-don’t-know-where-all-the-fictional-joins-are memoir-cum-fiction.” Similar to the real Ames, he’s a balding Brooklyn writer. However the Alcoholic-Ames is a writer of pulpy detective novels, while the real-life Ames writes comedy novels; the Alcoholic-Ames' parents died while he was a teenager, while the real-life Ames' parents are still very much alive; and on and on. Regardless of what’s real and what’s not, everything in the book feels real, with the kind of painful and awkward experiences that could only come from someone who has lived some version of them (Example: The teenage, heterosexual Ames’ awkward homosexual experiences with his best friend).

So what are my thoughts on the book? Well, I’m not as enamoured with it as I am with Bored To Death, I guess because BTD is aided by glossy filmmaking and the charisma and talent of the three lead actors. The story is made up of a series of vignettes in the life of an apparent alcoholic: his experiences with friends and family and his career from his teenage years to his mid-life years a little after 9/11 as a balding, Brooklynite writer. The series seems kind of formless, with, basically, one thing happening after another until it just kind of ends. The introduction of 9/11 into the story comes out of nowhere–which I guess shouldn’t be a criticism because the real life incident actually came out of nowhere–but I wish it had more of a thematic or literary connection to the events than it did in the story. But I have to say, the book was never boring, and the characters’ experiences and feelings felt just genuine and interesting and personal enough to be keep me engaged from beginning to end. It’s a pretty fluid read; never a dull moment.

It’s also just plain interesting if you're a fan of Bored To Death. The Alcoholic-Ames character, for example, writes the kind of pulpy books that inspire the Bored-To-Death Ames to take up his double life. Or there's the presence of a comic artist in Bored-To-Death Ames’ life, clearly inspired by real-life Ames' association with The Alcoholic artist Dean Haspiel (I’ll give Haspiel the benefit of the doubt that the Zach Galifinakis character is in no way based on him). Haspiel is the real artist of the odd, hilarious artwork that Galifinakis draws every week on the show. And at least one scene in the show reminded me of a scene in the comic: when Bored-To-Death Ames outruns the Russian mobsters in the series’ 5th episode, he lies down underneath the Brighton Beach docks and begins frantically burying himself in the sand. In the comic, Ames narrates part of the story while on-the-run and buried from-neck-to-toe in the sand under the docks.