From couch-surfing the Lower East Side to lamenting the construction of The Cross Bronx Expressway, Arthur Nersesian, author of The Fuck-Up, is about as New York as they come. His novels offer astute observations of his city and the people in it. Drawing on his own personal experiences, memories and fantasies, Arthur continues to create seriously compelling and often dark fiction.
His most recent project, “The Five Books of Moses,” is a fantastical interpretation of the history of New York City with Robert Moses as one of the story’s central figures. In the first book, The Swing Voter of Staten Island, we learn that New York City has fallen victim to a crippling terrorist attack and is no longer habitable to its citizens. New Yorkers are subsequently relocated and confined to a small-scale replica of their home city built in the middle of the Nevada desert on government property. The second book, The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx, works backwards to explain what prompted such a devastating nuclear attack on New York. Arthur is currently working on the third book of the series.
I got the chance to have lunch with Arthur in a fitting location: the Lower East Side. Here’s what we talked about.
Chief Magazine: So you were born in New York, right?
Arthur Nersesian: Born and raised in New York, yeah.
And how many different neighborhoods have you lived in over the years?
Let’s see…I don’t know how long you have to stay somewhere to be an official resident, but I lived principally in Manhattan. I lived in Midtown. My first home was 50th and 3rd. It was a rent-controlled tenement, and we had the whole floor. And then basically Brooklyn Heights. Then for a while on the Upper West Side. After that, the Middle West Side, around the Times Square area. Then for about a year in Chelsea. I had a really great apartment there for like $375. It was the best apartment ever, and I got rid of it thinking that I could find another one just as good.
You definitely can’t find that price in New York anymore.
Yeah, I didn’t know that New York was going to do what it did. But then I moved to the East Village and have basically been there since the late 70’s, early 80’s. Oh, and also Cobble Hill for a brief time. There’s been some times when I was kind of homeless where I was staying between places.
How many terrible landlords have you had to deal with?
[Laughing] Terrible landlords? Well, that’s a bit of a redundancy isn’t it? In fairness, you know, some of them were during times in my life when I just wasn’t earning a lot and having trouble just making the rent. Even as cheap it was. There was one in Gramercy Park that wouldn’t return my deposit. I remember this one guy…I think the polar caps could have been melting on the top floor and he just wouldn’t have given a shit.
Where were you living while you were writing The Fuck-Up?
Primarily where I am now, in the East Village.
Looking back, how would you describe that period of your life?
Well, the initial kick-start of writing that book was actually a bet with a girlfriend. I was dating a girl who had just graduated from Barnard, and she was also a writer. And we kind of had this little bet, a small wager, as to who could write a novel first. So I basically whipped out in a pretty quick period what became the kind of embryo of The Fuck-Up. And she was writing a novel as well, but she never finished. It was a 50-dollar bet, and I don’t think she ever paid me. Anyway, that’s what started The Fuck-Up, and I just kept kind of developing it. But I never had any real intention to submit it.
How did it eventually get picked up and published by MTV?
Well, I was about 26 or 27 when I wrote it. That was around 1986-87. It took me about a year or two to even decide to submit it and send it to an agent. I ended up submitting it to something like 50 agents in the city. I finally found one that was interested, and he in turn submitted it to about 30 major publishers. By 1988, he basically threw it back at me and said he couldn’t sell it. Then, by 1991, enough of my own friends had read it- I kidded with them about it a lot- but everyone just kept raving, saying that it was a wonderful book. I mean, no book had grabbed anything about the time, the place…you know, that whole “bright lights big city” shit was going on, but that felt more like LA than New York. It didn’t at all grab the poverty and you know…anyway, the point is that I finally said, “Fuck it, I’m going to publish this myself.” So, in 1991 I did a first small printing. Those sold out and then I did a second printing and a third printing. So by 1997, I got a postcard in the mail from this guy in this rock n’ roll band, Boys Against Girls, saying that he read the book and was interested in it and asked me if I would go to breakfast with him to talk about it. Anyway, it was Johnny Temple with Akashic Books, and he told me then that he was about to start Akashic Books. He was about 30, and I was like, “Well, where have you been before Akashic?” He said nowhere. So I said, “Are you a Writer?” No. “OK, are you an editor?” No. “Well, then what’d you do before this?” He said he was in a rock band. That was it.
Perfect.
Exactly, I figured there was no way it was going to happen with this guy. But, you know, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I made what I thought was a fairly generous offer, which he took, and in the weeks and months following he edited it and did all the artwork and I couldn’t believe he actually printed it. He did small printings at first, you know, kind of walking in the dark, but he kept selling through them.
There’s this great line in The Fuck-Up where Helmsley says something along the lines of “Any given counterculture will eventually be absorbed into and become a part of pop culture.” With that idea in mind, how did you feel that MTV, of all places, was finally where the book ended up?
Yeah. Well, for instance, if MTV occurred ten years early than it did, I can’t even imagine the East Village punk scene, you know, Television or Richard Hell, The Talking Heads; I can’t help but think that their music, their look, their feel, would have been swayed. And I mean, maybe in some ways that would have been for the better in the sense that they probably would have been less drug dependent. Some of them certainly got hit by that. But a lot of those bands, a lot of them would have lost their edge. So, on one hand MTV was the total antithesis, but on the other hand, I was 39 years old, I had written this book over 12 years ago, and they were really the first to say that they would publish it. At that point, it was the only show in town so I took it. But to their credit, they were very good about leaving it alone. They didn’t change a single word. So in that regard, MTV has been very very good to me.
Back to New York for a second, what do you think the Arthur Nersesian today if he was able to see New York, specifically the Lower East Side?
I mean, I don’t recognize New York City, you know. It’s a whole different city than the one I grew up in. I was born just prior to the city kind of bottoming out, and I mean, I kind of thought it was going to go the way of Detroit. I thought it was basically going to hollow out. And that idea really became the genesis to this new thing that I’m working on. If you asked me in the 1970’s, early 80’s where New York was going to be today, I would say that this would all be desolate. New York City would be a small circle of highly protected security zones around midtown and the outer rungs would just be a hollow ghetto.
Your most recent project, “The Five Books of Moses,” is obviously a departure from your previous work, both in terms of subject matter and plot sequence and stuff like that. When you sat down to start writing this, was it a conscious decision to do something different?
No, in fact, it predated a lot of the things I ended up doing. I actually started writing what turned out to be the beginning of “The Five Books of Moses” in Febuary of 1991. February 3rd, actually, I sat down and wanted to do a book that was a projection of New York, you know, the idea of a kind of distopian New York, a kind of salvaged New York. But things weren’t really clicking. It wasn’t really working. And then 9/11 occurred, and I realized that there were these similarities between the Nixon Administration and Vietnam and Bush and Iraq. That compelled me to go back and re-tinker with it.
Are you basically writing the five books in the same succession that they’re being published?
Yes, I am, more or less.
Has it been difficult for you to adapt to that style of writing? For the reader, I think the plot is engaging because it jumps around so much, but has it been hard for you to write in that sequence?
Well, I mean, it’s different. At first it was. In fact, I think the very first draft was in first-person. Except for maybe Suicide Casanova, which has multiple narrative viewpoints, most of my novels are first-person. But once you get the hang of it, it kind of kicks in and the storytelling takes its place.
A lot of your novels involve some essential quest for identity. This seems particularly true for the main character in The Swing Voter of Staten Island, Uli. He literally doesn’t know who he is, where he came from, or how he got to New York, Nevada. Eventually, though, he starts to suspect that he is Armenian. We’re both Armenian, coincidentally, and I was wondering what you expected that identity to signify to your readers. What is the real Armenian identity to you?
Well, I’ll tell you that book three starts to address that a little better, the notion of what Armenia is. To me, quintessentially, it’s this awful sense of, not homelessness, but the fact that our home was basically chopped out and the bulk of our prime real estate is basically eastern Turkey. And there’s still this awful unresolved feeling about the whole thing.
The issue of homelessness and displacement is something that comes through very strongly in both of the first two books. In the second,The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx, it’s addressed through the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway and the subsequent displacement of all the families in its path. That was one aspect of these two books that wasn’t fictionalized at all. All that really did happen.
Oh yeah! I had this one woman send me a photo of her house. I was also just interviewed for this Bill Joel documentary, and apparently he lived in the Bronx. He didn’t lose his house, but the whole area was disrupted. No one stayed, and it just really was this grenade in a latrine. A lot of people do lay the blame for New York’s collapse, especially the Bronx, on Robert Moses. Removing the neighborhood of East Tremont, I mean, East Tremont was kind of this cork in a shaken bottle of champagne. If you just let it sit, the whole thing would have simmered down, but by removing that cork you really allowed the ghetto-ization of the whole Northern and Central Bronx.
What drew you to the story of Robert Moses?
You know, it’s funny, he was just so ubiquitous and so powerful and his name was on everything. If you ever read the actual Robert Carroll biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, it’s phenomenal and some of it is truly wonderful. That’s why I feel kind of conflicted about Moses, because he put in all these wonderful parks and buildings and so forth. For a man that was never elected to office, he had this tremendous power. As I got to learn everything that happened, I realized that there was an incredible drama there. I don’t think any drama can actually surpass the real historical events.
Can you tell me a little about MK-ULTRA? It comes up in The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx, but I wasn’t able to find much information on it.
Well, that’s the problem. In the 1970’a, I think it was Frank Church, a Senator, started holding hearings on the CIA. He stumbled across this whole MK-ULTRA project, which was basically mind control and mind bending experiments that were, you know, way off the reservation. And when Helms, the head of the CIA, got wind of this Senator he quickly destroyed all the records of the MK-ULTRA. So, I mean, there’s no way of totally knowing what it was. Some of the experiments were totally whacky, some of t
hem dealt with psychic experimentation. The Soviets were working on similar stuff at the time. There was a lot of LSD testing.
Yeah, that was one of the things I read about.
Yeah, the bottom line is that Helms eventually got convicted of lying to Congress, the only head of the CIA to ever go through that. I believe he was pardoned by Reagan or something like that.
A lot of research must have gone into these most recent books.
Yeah, there definitely was. And from a variety of different sources. Some of it was kind of logistical and some of it was ragtag, some of it was pieced together or discovered. It’s interesting because some of it is always planned and some of it really just sneaks up on you.
Are there any contemporary authors that are especially influential for you?
Well, you know, the joy of reading has become the cost of writing for me. I always equate it to like a porn actor coming home to make love to his wife after a long day of fucking. It’s like, “I can’t do it anymore!” You know? I used to love reading and now I just kind of read what I can. But it’s exhausting after writing all day. I tend to read non-fiction when I can.
When do you expect the third book to be released?
I think we’re actually going to take a break. For two reasons: I wrote a short novel that’s not part of the series, but it’s kind of a fun little novel. Inasmuch as we’re not drawing the readership that we had hoped, I guess I feel like I want to reconnect with my own audience and give them some of the stuff that they want. It’s not really a downtown novel, but it’s called Mesopotamia, and I expect it to come out probably early next year. It’s kind of a departure, but it’s a lot easier and more recognizable. And then Book Three will come out sometime after that.
Interview by Michael Raymond
Photos Courtesy of Michael Raymond
Tags: arthur nersesian, Chief Magazine, Issue 17
Enjoyed the interview and am inspired to read Arthur’s books especially since I survived the exodus that ensued in the Bronx post-Cross Bronx Expressway.