I PASS LIKE NIGHT <i> by Jonathan Ames (Vintage: $8.95) </i>

Yet another tale of angst, alienation and ennui in New York City. By day, Alexander Vine works as a doorman at a ritzy Midtown hotel; by night, he prowls the seamy underworld of the Lower East Side. As the Manhattan drug scene has become passe, Jonathan Ames uses the narrator’s morbid interest in street prostitutes and bums as a metaphor for the degradation lurking behind the urban glitter. (Vine also consorts with gay men, enabling Ames to drag in the threat of AIDS as an unconvincing demon ex machina. ) The conceit might have worked if Ames had created a character who embodied either the wealth or sleaze that surrounds him. But Vine lacks the requisite aspirations and predatory appetites: He’s just another uninteresting loser in the big city, and the weak-limbed prose of “I Pass Like Night” collapses under the weight of its pretentions.