The Five Books of (Robert) Moses

Starred review from May 15, 2020
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.

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June 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.