Short Story Writer Ames Can't Go Long In 'Buffalo Lockjaw'

The disease lockjaw refers to the inability to open the mouth due to any number of gruesome causes, like tetanus. In his debut novel, "Buffalo Lockjaw," author Greg Ames suffers from the opposite problem: He doesn't know how to shut his mouth. The book is 288 pages of rambling, half-hearted explorations of the human condition. Nothing is wrapped up; nothing is solved; nothing is even adequately broached. Even the basic plotline limps to progress, held back by weakness of character and prose.

James Fitzroy, the main character, is a lackluster greeting card tagline writer who returns home to Buffalo, New York, for Thanksgiving. His ulterior motive, as expressed by tortured (and torturous) soliloquies is to put his Alzheimer's-stricken mother out of her misery-assisted suicide. While struggling with this decision, he shuffles into contact with his straitlaced father, successful sister and her girlfriend, old stoner friends and various other boring and terribly developed characters.

James is the worst kind of character. He is a failed depiction of an adult Holden Caulfield: weak, ineffective and convinced of his own genius even as he plods through a dull, meaningless life. His mind wanders into supposedly significant reflections on life that emerge as little more than cringe-worthy: "Start living, I tell myself. That seems to be the only moral in this fable. Live now. Don't wait for a future that might never come. … Maybe what it requires is a shift in perception. Okay, fine. And how do you bring that about? Because if you're thinking about being in the moment, you're not in it."

No grand revelations come to either the main character or the readers. In fact, James' huge breakthrough at the end of "Lockjaw" arrives when he asks a room full of people whether they would like coffee.

But James' problems go beyond essential flaws in the actual character. Ames leaves threads hanging left and right. Substance abuse? Alluded to within the first few pages and never actually dealt with. Complicated artistic woman? Makes purposeless cameos throughout the middle of the book. It's tempting to give Ames the benefit of the doubt and get excited at hints of tension, but it always ends in disappointment. Nothing comes to anything in this book.

It's as if Ames had so many ideas to include in his book that instead of weaving conflicts together and forming any sort of central theme, he threw them all on the pages to see what stuck. It's the only explanation for so many messy, undeveloped loose ends.

To be fair, Ames comes from a background of short fiction for publications like "McSweeney's" and "The Best American Nonrequired Reading"-he flounders when given so much room for so little plot and character development. His strengths, on the other hand, are a precise attention to detail and an eye for a beautiful turn of phrase. When James remembers his old dog, Bonkers, he remembers him eating "SuperBalls, dead birds, chicken wing bones." This specificity would make for quality literature if it referred to something more substantial than the mundanity of a dog's diet.

In fact, Ames hits his target only with his haunting depictions of the degenerative effects of Alzheimer's and James' mother's nursing home. James watches his mother struggle to communicate with him: "Broken-backed glottals. A jigsaw puzzle of interpretations … The vowels wander off like Grimm children lost in a forest." He captures the aimlessness, the despair, the brutal tragedy of the disease.

If only Ames were able to use this prodigious ability to write striking prose to enhance a strong plot- and character-driven backbone. Occasional pretty sentences are not enough to save this jumbled mess of a debut novel.