Now, this one was different.

Alan Blair is a young, highly neurotic and loony alcoholic writer, living
with his aunt and uncle in a small house in New Jersey. He always wears a
jacket and tie, has deeply ingrained habits and must always do things in a
certain way. Having received a settlement in a personal injury lawsuit (he
broke both his elbows when he slipped and fell at a business) of over $250K,
he does the only "logical" thing and hires a valet. And of course, the
valet's name is Jeeves and he's a very formal man. Blair and Jeeves stick
out like sore thumbs in the tiny tract house and soon Blair decides to take
off on a road trip to end all road trips, driving his ancient Chevrolet
Caprice, attired in his second-hand seersucker jacket and hummingbird
necktie. He's working on his second novel (the first being long
out-of-print and barely read) and is looking for a quiet place to write. He
heads up to Saratoga Springs when he is accepted by the Rose Colony, a
rather exclusive artists'' colony in the mountains with the unflappable
Jeeves in tow, having one adventure after another. Once ensconced at the
Rose Colony, Blair spends the first two days trying to decide if he has
ended up in a mental institution by mistake.

This book relates the outlandish happenings that occur over a week in this
outrageous young man's life. The back of the book has 7 critical reviews
that all use a single word: "hilarious!" Well, it's not really hilarious,
though it was hugely amusing. I've never read Ames before, but he has
several other books that I will be looking for in the future. Believe it or
not, I've never read Wodehouse and his venerable character Jeeves, so I
can't compare this to those, but this was a fun book and I enjoyed it. ( )

This book isn't, as someone else noted, particularly complicated. It takes a somewhat slovenly alcoholic--who has a great deal of money, thanks to a frivolous lawsuit--and sends him on a road trip, eventually ending up at a writer's colony. Through it all, he's assisted by his main man Jeeves, whose ancestors were all butlers and perhaps influenced one Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. This was a very funny book, and I think Ames is one of the best comic plotters working today--he should write for sitcoms. To see what I'm talking about, you really have to wait for the end of the book, but the thing has a sort of slow burn that is probably much harder to do than it looks. In some ways it reminded me of a Seinfeld episode, where these disparate parts would somehow come together in terrible, funny ways. And like the other Jeeves, this one could easily reappear in future novels. ( )

Jeeves devotees will find this disturbing skew of the classic interesting. ( )

Simply wonderful book, very funny. I read this book as an assignment for a contemporary lit class in college. ( )

This book putts along nicely, falls short around the middle, and then rolls into a nice ending. It's not as funny as it could be, not as madcap as it might be, not as serious as it wants to be, but still hangs together. ( )