The Five Books of (Robert) Moses

by Arthur Nersesian Narrated by Cody Roberts

Overview

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 faces its greatest immigration crisis ever: finding housing for millions of its own citizens. The federal government hastily retrofits an abandoned government installation in the Nevada desert. 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 gang warfare fuses with democracy, forming a frightening new political system: the gangocracy.



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 if somewhat unbalanced older brother Paul, a brilliant electrical engineer whose jealousy toward Robert and anger at the devastation caused by the man's urban "renewal" projects leads to a dire outcome.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"A sprawling, engrossing Pentateuch of an alternate New York City . . . Nersesian’s binge-worthy odyssey is a singularly wild ride."— Publishers Weekly

"Nersesian is one of my favorite New York authors; this tome is one to lose yourself in."— Bob Odenkirk, actor, Breaking Bad

"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

"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, author of The Perfume Burned His Eyes

Kirkus Reviews

★ 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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177430799
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	07/28/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

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