Buffalo Lockjaw

February 9, 2009
Dreary, winter-bound Buffalo, N.Y., is as much a character as any of the slackers populating Ames's darkly humorous debut about a young man with a copy of Suicide for Dummies
in his car and a 56-year-old mother with Alzheimer's who he believes wants to die. James, 28, fled hometown stasis in the mid-'90s for Manhattan, where he writes greeting card verse for Kwality Kards. Back home at Thanksgiving to visit his mother in a nursing home, he reconnects awkwardly with old friends who hail his supposed big-city success. His family isn't as awestruck. Father Rodney, a solid citizen rooted in country club bonhomie, laments his son's lack of discipline, and his lesbian sister, Kate, a physical therapist visiting with her girlfriend from Oregon, mocks her brother's career path. Both evade his oblique references to euthanasia—the real reason for his return. Ames's depiction of James's bedside concern for his mother straddles the line between caustically comic and wrenchingly emotional, while the wry riffs on family tension and the sad state of Buffalo that appear throughout this fine first novel don't undercut the serious consideration of murder or mercy for terminal patients.

Starred review from February 15, 2009
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.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 15, 2009
James Fitzroy travels home to Buffalo for the Thanksgiving holidayand to assist his mother in committing suicide. Ellen, only 56 and a nurse, author, and patients-rights activist, has Alzheimers. Several years before, as her dementia deepened, she told James she planned to commit suicide; he talked her out of it but now understands that she knew best. But James is the slacker in the family. Can he do it? Buffalo Lockjaw is a small, knowing, finely crafted debut novel, capable of rousing empathy, identification, pain, and even laughter. Small details of nursing homesand Alzheimersare painfully accurate; memory boxes outside rooms, middle-aged visitors shocked that Mom is dressed shabbily in some other patients clothes, moments of unexpected lucidity, Perry Como songs playing, and endless memories of Mom when she was herself. Ames is equally incisive on family dynamics. James and his father grope to understand each other, and James spends as much time as possible revisiting his Buffalo youth. And thats where the laughs are. An altogether winning novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)