Book review: Wake Up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames

Ames is a considerable misanthropic talent, even if he does hail from over the pond

Wake Up, Sir, the debut novel by the author of the HBO comedy Bored to Death, is a curious mix of parody, confessional, roman á clef and the picaresque. First published in 2004, but gaining a tardy British premiere courtesy of Pushkin, its premise bungs a Woody Allenesque protagonist – a neurotic, sexually constipated Jewish alcoholic called Alan Blair – into one of P G Wodehouse’s spiffier Jeeves and Wooster joints. Other Allen-esque touchstones include “The Kugelmass Episode”, his 1977 short story in which a neurotic, sexually constipated Jewish academic is catapulted into Madame Bovary.

Like Alan Felix in Allen’s early masterpiece Play It Again Sam, who hallucinates a noirish Humphrey Bogart, Blair receives advice from his own icon: a gentleman’s gentleman called Jeeves. As with Felix, this vision feels like the product of an unstable imagination. In Blair’s case, one that has gorged on too many Wodehousian run-ins. Ames smartly turns Jeeves’s almost supernatural ability to materialise at Wooster’s side (“he evaporated and then reconstituted himself”) into a psychodrama more reminiscent of Fight Club than Wooster’s Drones Club.

Blair’s chats with his manservant are compartmentalised from his other concerns, which revolve around booze, Jewishness and his other manservant. Such juxtapositions – Ames’s explicit naughtiness rubbing shoulders with Wodehouse’s cheerful propriety – makes the early chapters great fun. The intrigue really begins when Blair’s impersonation of Wooster’s brisk slang degrades as his addictions, narcissism and obsessive preoccupations take over.

These are biffed along by a digressive road trip that transports Blair from a surprisingly kindly aunt to an artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs where he fails to work on a long-deferred second novel (his first was a dud).

Ames’s satirical update works best when he magnifies the melancholy aspects hidden by Wodehouse’s wit: Wooster’s idleness, fecklessness, complacency, over-indulgence and futility. The threat of violence in Wodehouse (see Roderick Spode, Stilton Cheesewright) now bursts out in farcical beatings. Wooster’s world, famously untouched by history or the march of time, is now a dangerous illusion. It is as if the consolations of great light entertainment (laughter, escapism) cannot mask the quiet desperation of Blair’s existence: “I was thirty years old and a complete failure … I couldn’t be the only lonely person in the world.”

Where Wake Up, Sir! is less successful is in going head to head with its old comic master. Ames channels Wodehouse convincingly, but his prose lacks that rhythmic quick-step. Nor do his mock heroic similes bear comparison: “my mind [is] like a set of house keys: lose it and then happily find it, only to lose it again”. Still, Ames is a considerable misanthropic talent, even if he does hail from over the pond. What ho, in all senses of the phrase.