Reading: I Pass Like Night

Just finished Jonathan Ames' 1989 debut, "I Pass Like Night." Phew. It's a downer, for sure, charting the misadventures of one Alexander Vine, a hopelessly hopeless 20-something Jewish doorman at the Manhattan Four Seasons who spends his nights picking up hookers in the Bowery, talking to bums, and rationalizing his experiments with mansexuality at the height of the New York AIDS epidemic. For a while I couldn't get enough of this genre: episodic, jarring, these books follow disaffected young people doing drugs and having sex and just spiraling and spiraling. With no point, really, no moral, just the trauma of youth in an increasingly brutal and vulgar world. They flourished in the 80s. I read "Bright Lights, Big City" by Jay McInerney, the best example of this genre from the East Coast, and "Less Than Zero" by Brett Easton Ellis, the really horrifying L.A. version of the same story. But after so much of this, "I Pass Like Night" was starting to give me motion sickness. And anyway, didn't F. Scott Fitzgerald write the bankrupt-youth book to rule them all way back in the Jazz Age? But I am indebted in a way to these courageous authors and their beautiful and damned protagonists. The Mexico City book of this style, Jorge Dorantes' "Nada Que Ver," which I devoured twice over during my last semester in college, opened my eyes to a Mexico not imagined in Hollywood films, tourist guides, or bedtime stories. It's still my favorite: a tribe of pill-popping, bed-hopping chilango hipsters careen out of control to a "Thelma & Louise" finish. The author, according to his book jacket bio, once wrote subtitles for porn films. ... Please, someone translate it.