The Double Life Is Twice as Good: Essays and Fiction

I really wanted to like this book from the moment that my friend Rebecca grabbed it off of a shelf at the venerable City Lights (that's right, I dropped that name) and said, "This is the book that Bored to Death was based on!" (Bored to Death, for the uninitiated, is a mystery-comedy series that used to run on HBO that has now been cancelled. The main character is a fictionalized Jonathan Ames. I think it is the second-funniest show ever after, of course, the ne plus ultra that is Arrested Development.)

Sadly, for the most part, this collection left me wishing there was more to it. Bored-to-Death-the-short-story is almost nothing like Bored-to-Death-the-TV-show. You can recognize traces of the pilot episode, but it is played like a show more Raymond Chandler novel and played extremely straight. After that, it breaks down into Journalism, Personal Essays, and Short Stories.

Journalism is easily the best section of the three, with Ames taking weird, wonderful trips to a Goth convention, the US Open, the Meatpacking District of New York City, and hanging out with Marilyn Manson and Lenny Kravitz. Personal Essays is the weakest, with some occasional amusing bits, but it's mostly painfully recycled content from other places. (I believe I mentioned this in my review for William Gibson's Distrust That Particular Flavor but it bears repeating: if I want to read the foreword for another book, I would be reading that book. Short Stories has some good pieces in it, but they mostly seem like thinly fictionalized Personal Essays (i.e. stories about people that Ames has slept with).

All in all, I should probably be rating this book lower, but I'm willing to give it the third star based on the strength of the Journalism section alone. I'm not sure if I'd grab this off the shelf at City Lights again, but if it turned up in a used-book bin, I would recommend giving it at least a shot if you're not familiar with Ames. show less