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    Wake Up, Sir!
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    Wake Up, Sir!
    Unavailable
    Wake Up, Sir!
    Ebook429 pages9 hours

    Wake Up, Sir!

    By Jonathan Ames

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A brilliant contemporary reimagining of the greatest comic relationship of all time, which goes far beyond pastiche to places even Wodehouse couldn't.

    Alan Blair, the hero of Wake Up, Sir!, is a young, loony writer with numerous problems of the mental, emotional, sexual, spiritual, and physical variety. He's very good at problems. But luckily for Alan, he has a personal valet named Jeeves, who does his best to sort things out for his troubled master. And Alan does find trouble wherever he goes. He embarks on a perilous and bizarre road journey, his destination being an artists colony in Saratoga Springs. There Alan encounters a gorgeous femme fatale who is in possession of the most spectacular nose in the history of noses. Such a nose can only lead to a wild disaster for someone like Alan, and Jeeves tries to help him, but... Well, read the book and find out!

    'Too funny for the canon of high literature, the book is too brilliant to be mere diversionary humour' New York Press

    Jonathan Ames's latest comic novel is so brilliant and charming that any description of it is bound to be impossibly dull by comparison

    Seattle Weekly

    'A Wodehouse novel for the recovery era' The New York Times Book Review

    'What do you get when you cross Carry On, Jeeves with Portnoy's Complaint? . . . Jonathan Ames's very funny new novel, Wake Up, Sir!' Newsday

    'The X-rated Woody Allen'Guardian

    'Ames is a remarkable comic writer. He excels at punching out hilarious monologues on subjects ranging from nose fetishes to the planks of Buddhism' Time Out New York

    Cause for celebration... As Jeeves himself might prompt Ames, 'Carry on, sir!' Washington Post

    Pungent and hilarious, if completely off the deep end' Kirkus Reviews

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPushkin Press
    Release dateMay 21, 2015
    ISBN9781782271376
    Unavailable
    Wake Up, Sir!
    Author

    Jonathan Ames

    Jonathan Ames is the author of I Pass Like Night; The Extra Man; What’s Not to Love?; My Less Than Secret Life; Wake Up, Sir!; I Love You More Than You Know; The Alcoholic; and The Double Life Is Twice As Good. He’s the creator of the HBO® Original Series Bored to Death and has had two amateur boxing matches, fighting as “The Herring Wonder.” His most recent work is the detective novel A Man Named Doll. 

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    Reviews for Wake Up, Sir!

    3.5/5

    170 ratings15 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      Not a terrible read, but a poor attempt at making a modern Jeeves and Wooster.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      Wake Up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames
      1.5 stars, rounded to 2

      Although this book got off to a rollicking start and it seemed as though it would be 3 or 4 stars like most of the Wooster and Jeeves books this is a play on, and although there were some funny scenes, it just wasn't for me due to some of the key differences between the two fools, Bertie Wooster in the original and Alan Blair in this book.

      Alan Blair is an American agnostic Jew, a struggling writer who received a quarter of a million dollars in a lawsuit and so hired a personal valet, Jeeves, and certainly he notes that he likes the name because of Wodehouse's books. I am not going to give a plot summary. Suffice to say that the reason this book failed for me is because much of the humour was darker, playing off of Blair's depression, neuroses and deep alcoholism, and while in the TV show Monk's neuroses were funny, I just don't find depression or alcoholism funny, nor drunk people. Although there was a marijuana scene I found rather funny, which was a bit of a surprise, but I don't want to say why in case this is a book you like.

      Jonathan Ames can certainly write humour, it just wasn't my cup of tea.
    • 4/5
      This is not an attempt to make another Jeeves and Wooster book. Jeeves is a device for the hero of the book to cope with his alcoholism and there is a Wodehouse style to the dialogue but don't think you are getting a Jeeves adventure here. If that is what you are after you will be disappointed. However if you are after a good comedy yarn then this should definitely satisfy. Quirky and enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      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 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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      Not hilarious, as several reviews cited on the back cover promised; silly, amusing, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. It sometimes seemed to be trying too hard, which may or may not be the point, depending on how much Wodehouse you've read.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Jeeves devotees will find this disturbing skew of the classic interesting.
    • 5/5
      Simply wonderful book, very funny. I read this book as an assignment for a contemporary lit class in college.
    • 3/5
      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 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.
    • 4/5
      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 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."


    • 2/5
      A long time ago, when I was dating a guy who was reading scripts for the production company he worked for, he sometimes also had books come in that he was supposed to read to see if they would make a good movie. So he brought this home, but wasn't much for books, so I read it. It really wasn't my cup of tea, plus it has a lot of plot issues. So overall, I didn't think it would make a good film (and I don't think it's been made into one yet, so perhaps I'm not the only one who thinks this) and I didn't like the style.