Buffalo Lockjaw - Softcover

Ames, Greg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1401309801 ISBN 13: 9781401309800

Publisher: Hyperion, 2009

Synopsis

"Buffalo Lockjaw, like its charming, bitter screw-up of a narrator, reaches finally for larger meaning, and succeeds. . . . A brazen and tender book about a city and a scene, a mother and a son, and the beauty and pain of several kinds of love."
--Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land

"Ames knows how to build up the world with a light hand while still getting to the complicated and painful ways we muddle through. Funny, fresh, and generous."
--Aimee Bender, author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

"In Buffalo Lockjaw, love of one's parents and love of one's hometown mix powerfully with the mad undertow of loss that seems as inevitable in life as gravity."
--Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir!

"Greg Ames, one of the funniest writers I've ever read, faces dead-on the most terrifying event in a person's life. Buffalo Lockjaw is frightening, heart-rending, and beautiful. . . . I didn't want it to end."
--Poe Ballantine, author of Things I Like About America

"Greg Ames manages to evoke place and expose the complexities of character in a single swift phrase. It is a funny-sad, heartbreaking, hypnotically readable debut."
--Adrienne Miller, author of The Coast of Akron James Fitzroy isn't doing so well. Though his old friends in Buffalo believe his life in New York City is a success, in fact he writes ridiculous taglines for a greeting card company. Now he's coming home on Thanksgiving to visit his aging father and dying mother, and unlike other holidays, he's not sure how this one is going to end. Buffalo Lockjaw introduces a fresh new voice in American fiction.

About this title

About the Author

Greg Ames is the author of Buffalo Lockjaw, a novel that won the 2009 Book of the Year Award from the New Atlantic Booksellers Association (NAIBA). Buffalo Lockjaw was voted #1 in The Believer's Reader Survey for 2010. Greg Ames's work has appeared in the Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney's, The Southern Review, The Sun Magazine, failbetter.com, and Fiction International. He has been shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize. He splits his time between New York City and Hamilton, New York, where he is an assistant professor at Colgate University.

From Kirkus Reviews

In this beautifully observed debut, a son wrestles with the possibility of assisted suicide for his mother, stricken with Alzheimer’s. Responsibility was the watchword for Ellen from the get-go. The oldest of five, she began taking care of her siblings when she was only ten; her otherworldly parents were in church. At 16, she decided to become a nurse; during her 30-year career, she wrote a successful nursing textbook. Now, still only 56, this good woman is a near-vegetable in a Buffalo, N.Y., nursing home, muttering nonsense words; her moments of lucidity are rare. Four years earlier, at the onset of her disease and understanding what lay ahead, she had confided in her son James that she was considering suicide; aghast, he had dissuaded her. But the 28-year-old, now trying gamely to connect with his mother, is having second thoughts. James, the narrator and protagonist, had left Buffalo for Brooklyn and a job writing greeting cards. Back home for Thanksgiving, he is thinking seriously about a mercy killing, but his father Rodney, a retired office manager, is dead set against the idea. Rodney is a stand-up guy, a stoic witness to his wife’s condition (he visits every day) and a decent if uncommunicative father. James had been a rebel with a drinking problem and is only now settling into adulthood. His more self-confident sister Kate is also back for the holiday with her lesbian partner; family dynamics are all-important here. Ames skillfully counterpoints James’s nursing-home visits with boozy reunions with old friends and sprinkles in interviews with Buffalo locals taken from an oral history James once compiled. These interviews highlight a strain of exuberant eccentricity in the otherwise dour city, and they provide bright splashes of narrative color. The satisfying and credible resolution, lightly foreshadowed, will come as a surprise. A novel about hard choices and doing the right thing that is modest, moving and true.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hyperion
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1401309801
• ISBN 13: 9781401309800
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 290