Wake Up, Sir!: A Novel

Ames can capture P. G. Wodehouse's writing style quite well, and often he exceeds Wodehouse's humor. However, where Wodehouse's plots were either genuinely innovative or the stuff of pulp novels, Ames tries too hard to be quirky and unexpected. In the end, the wackiness just doesn't add up to much, story- or character-wise.

A pitch perfect style-parody of P. G. Wodehouse, or more specifically of Bertie Wooster, "Wake Up, Sir!" is a book with a target audience so vanishingly small that it's a wonder it was every published. But being a member of that target audience, I enjoyed every syllable.

The juxtaposition of the modern setting and sexual topics with the Wodehousian prose afforded not a little enjoyment. Ames has an ear for the well placed metaphor which, if not the rival of Wodehouse, is at least in the same style.

I keep comparing to Wodehouse, but "Wake Up, Sir!" is a story in its own right, with an engaging cast of characters and some interesting embedded philosophy. It's a bit scattered, and feels like a selection of a much longer story, or perhaps show more that's just because it is a slice of a much longer life. Either way, this has made me likely to pick up something else by Ames in the future, although I will be a bit disappointed when I get a voice other than Bertie Wooster's.

Highly recommended for Wodehouse fans. For anyone else, you'll have to make up your own mind. show less

I did in fact laugh out loud reading this gem of a book. Not since Naked by David Sedaris have I laughed this much. I guess its not for everyone. It is preposterous, and hilarious. I thought of Woody Allen sometimes when reading this, it also has elements of the hard boiled genres mixed in with a wacky set of characters. A bit of a guilty pleasure, I would recommend this for a casual read on vacation or in the tub, someplace where you can let yourself relax and just enjoy this thing.

The narrator tells the story through his internal dialog, which is in turns insightful, witty, self absorbed and self deprecating. The narrator fully acknowledges this absorption, which makes it tolerable, and helped me to appreciate the insightfulness and show more hilarity of his perceptions.

I was impressed that I did not picture Mr Schwartzman even once while reading this. His physical descriptions of the characters was very good. show less

I hold P.G. Wodehouse in the same high regard as I do a well-made martini: it is perfection itself and to change anything, even by the slightest degree, would be sacriledge. So I was a bit dubious about Jonthan Ames's use of Jeeves in a contemporary novel. Could it really be done and done, perhaps, well?
The answer is a resounding yes. Without giving anything away, Ames uses the characters from Wodehouse in a slightly altered form and presents us with typical Wodehouse situations in, again a slightly altered form, and Jeeves. Fortunately Jeeves stays Jeeves. The book starts out in typical Wodehousian fashion but, and here's what saves the book from being a simple pastiche, diverges into something else, plunging the characters into deeper show more depths of trouble. show less

Man, I'll always hold a torch for Jonathon Ames. There's something wonderfully sweet and sour about his writing, and for all his verbal pyrotechnics and easy charm, an earnest, sad, human weight anchoring all of his books and stories.

Also, he's absolutely fuckin hilarious. There's that too.

Honestly Wake Up, Sir, by Jonathan Ames, is very well-written book. Ames writes in a quick paced style that unique and interesting. That said, for a book that has hilarious written nine times on its cover and is described as laugh out loud funny, it' s not really that funny. It's witty and clever, but not funny. In fact, as the story goes on, it gets down right depressing and then ends on a pretty awful note. The main character is an uncontrolled alcoholic who's probably also schizophrenic . He continually finds himself with others who are also very unhappy and in difficult circumstances, also usually of their own making. By the end, I felt like a ball of unhappy as well. The only thing that kept me going through the book was the same show more character that kept our main character going - Jeeves. I just very much wanted to know if he was real - I think I know but it's ambiguous enough to keep me thinking about the book, and so I've rated the book as three stars, even though I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone who wasn't looking to have their happiness dampened. show less

I mean, I really don't think I even need to read any more Jonathan Ames novels because there is so much overlap between them and the show I love, Bored to Death. This one is kind of a wild ride between Ames fleeing family then a crazy fight, then a disaster at an artist colony. I don't know how much of it is fact but Ames writes as if every single word were a page from his every accumulating diary that he's revealing for the sake of your own pleasure. In some ways, though it's way more personal, it's enjoyable in the same was as Jack Kerouac's On the Road...meaning, though it's more modern, it's certainly an adventure the reader is taken on for a ride.

The main protagonist is somewhat hopeless with his personal butler and his free show more falling dipsomaniac ways but there's a fondness there that I couldn't help but feel rather strongly.


I think you'll get a better idea about what this book is like from the following quotes..and then you'll know if you can love it, too.

pg. 87, "...this made sense the fellow I'd tangled with had struck me with his right-hand toaster, which had sent my nose, like an English sentence, from the left to the right."

pg. 108-109 "I felt me sanity returning instantaneously, as if it had only been a case of temporary insanity, which is very useful for committing murder but not so useful in other situations...thank God I wasn't at an asylum! Someone with a PHD in art history could only be running an art house, not a nuthouse! ...I could be having delirium without the tremens."


pg 133, "I'm going to sally forth now. Do you think Sally Forth would be a good stage name for an actress?

"Quite winning, sir"

"I agree. If I ever meet an actress with a terrible name, I;ll suggest Sally Forth. Or any woman with a terrible name. Doesn't have to be an actress..."

pg. 169 "Oh Jeeves," I said. I was in bed. It was morning. My brain was a blister and my moth was an old leather wallet without any money."

pg. 171 "Time has no effect on me!" Sober I would have never damaged an old clock or made such a vainglorious pronouncement.

pg. 179, "As far as I know, his nose had no name, but it was certainly elegant, a kind of Dorian Gray nose, much younger than the rest of his face, and almost a twin in shape and expression to Peter O'Toole's nose in Lawrence of Arabia, which may be the greatest male nose in the history of cinema.

pg. 197 "It could be a female but most sociopaths are male. Females take out their troubles on themselves, for the most part."

pg 214, "At some point in time in America, trees have made something of a comeback, while of course suffering great losses elsewhere. But why no one comments on all the trees we have running around is something of a mystery to me. Seems like it's at least one delusional positive we could hold on to, while everything else goes up in flames."

pg 224, "Rather than say anything, I stood up and put my foot in the water, testing it. Testing the water, that is, not my foot. Though maybe it was my foot I was testing-whether it could tolerate the water's temperature. Oh God, I don't know what's more difficult, life or the English language."

pg. 280-281 "We do not have the capacity to recall each instant of our lives, so experience becomes compacted, summed up, dismissed. An affair is reduced to a sentence: 'We were together three years.' This makes the life lived seem rather short...The whole thing is a conundrum, sir. It takes us sixty, seventy, eighty years to live a life, and it appears to go by so quickly, and yet we also know hoe long it took to get where we are..I think of the world of cinema. A two hour film is the result of hundreds of hours of shot footage. The same thing with life. It can all be remembered and reviewed quite quickly, but it took millions of moments to create it."

pg. 283, "I'm awfully splenetic today. I'm suffering from humors but it's not very funny."

pg 285 "I just wanted to say that I think the word I is the saddest word in the English language." show less