The Extra Man is a queer sort of romantic comedy. Its narrator, Louis Ives, a clean-cut Jewish boy who can pass as WASP, a transvestite dabbler who can pass as straight and even square, finds himself in the seductive heart of New York. Louis has two romantic aspirations, not strictly compatible: one is to be a “young gentleman” in the mould of his favourite fictional characters (the creations of Scott Fitzgerald, Wodehouse, Waugh, Wilde); the other is to be an all-American girl. This gets him into trouble; he is expelled from his teaching job in New Jersey when discovered modelling a colleague’s brassiere in the staffroom.
So to New York, where the budding young gentleman finds a room-mate and mentor, Henry Harrison, a sixty-something former actor and playwright. Harrison is shabby-genteel, with the emphasis on shabby. His clothes are always encrusted with old food; fleas and cockroaches are frequently despatched by “bombs” in the apartment; various bottles are hidden beneath his bed, some containing water, some urine. His delivery is thespian, his prejudices hilarious. Henry supports himself by ligging; he ducks into parties and launches, he sneaks into the second halves of musicals, and – as “the extra man” – attends social functions as the escort of various wealthy and ancient women.
Henry is, in a sense, a sexless prostitute; Louis, however, has started tentatively to check out the full-blooded version, frequenting transsexual bars where the lady-boys chat to him and turn tricks. They too have their romantic dream: marriage to a man who wants them for precisely what they are, and who will look after them. Reality is harsher; as one of the chapter titles has it, “All the Queens are Dead”. Louis feels a great deal of confusion and shame over his experiments in this area; he is always polite to a fault, always very thoughtful and anxious, and records his reactions to everything with charming earnestness. He is, frankly, unable to work out if he is gay or straight, a transvestite or a lover of transsexuals, a lover of youth (a colleague “caused me anguish in the same way pretty, clean-looking blond girls with thin arms always have… as if I’ve been punched in the stomach”), or a gerontophile (his feelings towards Henry and his women verge on the erotic, though never explicitly).
As the picaresque narrative progresses, the real tensions come from Louis’s concern that Henry should like him, and the fear that if he confessed to his secret desires and adventures, Henry – a puritan of sorts, asexual for the most part and only once campy flirtatious – would throw him out. There is another bra-stealing moment, extremely funny, and some affecting brushes with sex workers, including “the recession spankologist”, who smartly advertises her services as affordable during an economic downturn. The descriptions of the client’s baffled longing, obsessive curiosity, sudden, needy risk-taking and, ultimately, shame and disgust, are peerless. Jonathan Ames, who has a successful career as a risqué columnist and nightclub raconteur, has a gift for making the seamiest subjects strangely innocent and charming. The wit is supplied partly by the orotund eccentricities of Henry, whose bons mots recall Wilde or Quentin Crisp; this is enhanced by the unerring good humour of his narrator, whose unsparing honesty of expression becomes a seductive amusement. Ives’s delicate anxieties and naive enthusiasms flip between bathos and camp punchline. If there is a plot – Ives’s desire for Henry’s approval, and his furtive shame over his Jewishness and his polymorphous perversities – it is a slim one; if there is closure, it is warm but hesitant. As a novel about acceptance and accommodation, however – about loving oddness for its normal and human self – The Extra Man is a pleasure and a success.