The Five Books of (Robert) Moses

by Arthur Nersesian

Overview

A dramatic, playful, brutal, sweeping, and always entertaining reimagining of New York City history, presaging today’s political tyranny.

“A postmodern masterwork that outdoes Pynchon in eccentricity—and electricity, with all its dazzling prose.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

After a domestic terrorist unleashes a dirty bomb in Manhattan in 1970, making the borough uninhabitable, FBI agent Uli Sarkisian finds himself in a world that is suddenly unrecognizable as the United States is faced with its greatest immigration crisis ever: finding housing for millions of its own citizens. The federal government hastily retrofits an abandoned military installation in the Nevada desert, vast in size. Despite the government’s best intentions, as the military pulls out of “Rescue City,” the residents are increasingly left to their own devices, and tribal warfare fuses with democracy, forming a frightening evolution of the two-party system: the gangocracy. Years after the Manhattan cleanup was supposed to have been finished, Uli travels through this bizarre new New York City, where he is forced to reckon with his past, while desperately trying to get out alive.

The Five Books of (Robert) Moses alternates between the outrageous present of Rescue City and earlier in the twentieth century, detailing the events leading up to the destruction of Manhattan. We simultaneously follow legendary urban planner Robert Moses through his early years and are introduced to his equally ambitious older brother Paul, a brilliant electrical engineer whose jealousy toward Robert and anger at the devastation caused by the man’s “urban renewal” projects lead to a dire outcome.

Arthur Nersesian’s most important work to date examines the political chaos of today’s world through the lens of the past. Fictional versions of real historical figures populate the pages, from major politicians and downtown drag queens to notorious revolutionaries and obscure poets.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781617754999
Publisher:	Akashic Books, Ltd.
Publication date:	07/28/2020
Pages:	1504
Sales rank:	1,044,667
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 2.80(d)

About the Author

ARTHUR NERSESIAN is the author of fourteen books, including the cult-classic national bestseller The Fuck-Up (more than 100,000 copies sold), Suicide Casanova, Manhattan Loverboy, East Village Tetralogy, and Mesopotamia. He is a native New Yorker who runs a writing workshop in the East Village and can be reached on Facebook. His latest work is The Five Books of (Robert) Moses.

Editorial Reviews

06/29/2020

Nersesian (Mesopotamia) delivers a sprawling, engrossing Pentateuch of an alternate New York City from 1980 to the present, a vibrant, violent world that bubbles with political intrigue and is controlled by gangs. A terrorist attack has rendered New York uninhabitable; by 1980, it has been reestablished in Nevada and is known more familiarly as Rescue City. The Piggers control the Bronx and Queens, the Crappers Manhattan and Brooklyn. Each book has a different New York borough in its title. At the center of the epic is Ulysses “Uli” Sarkisian, an amnesiac FBI agent who lands in Queens on Election Day in 1980 with a mission he vaguely remembers. On a bus, Uli meets Mallory, who travels with a baby kangaroo. She eventually becomes mayor, and their lives cross frequently over the five books. In the second book, Nersesian jumps back in time for the story of Paul Moses, elder brother of esteemed Robert, and his family. Paul’s lesbian daughter, Bea, enters politics while Uli’s sister, Karen, joins SDS in 1965. Many celebrities of the 1960s and ’70s appear as minor characters, including Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, and other members of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and much of the novel’s resonance (and fun) comes from how each has been reimagined. Dozens of black-and-white illustrations by Lisa Archigian playfully enhance the narrative. Nersesian’s binge-worthy odyssey is a singularly wild ride. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"Mr. Nersesian’s work is a tale of extremes. The finished product weighs more than 4 pounds. If he stacked all his manuscript pages since he began the book back in 1993 it would stand 6 feet tall, a shade taller than himself, Mr. Nersesian says . . . Main characters include a fictionalized Robert Moses, the powerful public official who reshaped New York City and its environs, and his brother Paul, an electrical engineer. A difficult relationship between the two has dire consequences. There are also pop-culture favorites from the period, including psychedelic evangelist Timothy Leary; urbanologist Jane Jacobs, and poet Allen Ginsberg. All are intended to show readers how the value of culture erodes in an isolated world."

Wall Street Journal

"Nersesian is one of my favorite New York authors; this tome is one to lose yourself in."

Bob Odenkirk

"Arthur Nersesian is the Bard of Lower East Side Manhattan . . . He knows every street corner, every bar, store, book stall, and even the famous 100-year-old Russian shvitz on 10th Street. Nobody does it better. Not Don DeLillo, not Richard Price, and not William Burroughs."

On the Seawall

"Imagine Kurt Vonnegut channeling the Book of Revelations and transmitting it to the faithful of a postcataclysmic New York City and you get a glimpse of the monumental literary feat Arthur Nersesian has accomplished . . . It is imaginative, frightening, and hilarious, often all at the same time."

Michael Imperioli

"The unquestioned authority of Robert Moses is difficult to fully grasp today—this unimaginable, outsized character whose outrageous deeds seem the stuff of novels. And that is how Nersesian is tackling him, by blending fact with fiction. Historical events and persons are interwoven with a fascinating apocalyptic story and literary license, at last revealing the tumultuous life and legacy of Robert Moses. Faced with such a daunting subject matter...Nersesian's narrative is masterful."
—Brooklyn Eagle

"Imagine Kurt Vonnegut channeling the Book of Revelations and transmitting it to the faithful of a postcataclysmic New York City and you get a glimpse of the monumental literary feat Arthur Nersesian has accomplished...It is imaginative, frightening, and hilarious, often all at the same time."
—Michael Imperioli, author of The Perfume Burned His Eyes

"Arthur Nersesian's fantastical magnum opus is both a love song to the vibrant culture of 'old' New York City and a cautionary commentary on the rampant political opportunism of the twenty-first century. As meticulously plotted as the best Stephen King novels, with world-building that might arouse jealousy in Philip K. Dick, The Five Books of (Robert) Moses shows us why Nersesian has established himself as one of New York City's most vital chroniclers."
—T Cooper, author of Real Man Adventures and the Changers YA series

From the Publisher

★ 2020-05-04
Three decades in the making, Nersesian’s pentalogy—one book for each New York borough—imagines a very strange alternative past.

Roaming from the 1930s to the 1980s, Nersesian’s five books imagine a New York vacated after a bombing campaign during the 1969 Days of Rage and relocated to the Nevada desert. As the sprawling story opens, Ulysses Sarkisian (who shares the pop star Cher’s family name) is roaming, biblically, out in the sand. Uli, as he’s called, is amnesiac, knowing only that he has to get across town to fulfill a mission. Eventually he connects with his sister, who’s in the thick of a gang war between the “Crappers” and the “Piggers,” a contest that takes Uli all across a Rescue City in which, like the real New York of yore, nothing works well: “When the sewer got blocked and Staten Island flooded, the homes became uninhabitable, even after it drained,” a Crapper leader tells him, dodging Uli’s conspiracy-theory question about why the place was built even before the bombing campaign began. Those terror attacks are the product of another gang war of sorts, the very real fraternal struggle between Robert and Paul Moses, each of whom does his bit to destroy the old city. The story plunges ever deeper into the surreal as Uli morphs into Paul and vice versa even as Paul’s daughter, Beatrice, runs for office disguised as would-be Andy Warhol assassin Valerie Solanas (“I think we want to downplay that,” Bea says of the attempt). Allen Ginsberg, Jane Jacobs, Mark Rudd, Ronald Reagan, Timothy Leary, and other real-life figures play parts in Nersesian’s decidedly centrifugal story, which, though challenging, follows its own rigorous logic across a landscape of mirages and hallucinations. Or, as Uli replies when Bea asks him whether he’s figured out why he’s there, “No, not really. But I don’t know, I saw a lot of weird things.”

A postmodern masterwork that outdoes Pynchon in eccentricity—and electricity, with all its dazzling prose.

Kirkus Reviews