Shit Show

The Fuck-Up was Arthur Nersesian's breakout novel. Self-published and placed in book stores on consignment, it eventually sold 140,000 copies. A translation of the The Fuck-Up has recently become a "succes d'estime," as well as a publishing sensation in France. It's not hard to see why the French would gravitate to Nersesian's world of 80s New York. It's a literal A Bout de Souffle with a main character who works as an usher at a Cinema Village type place and who then pretends to be gay so he can remain in the employ of a porno theater--yes, he's a male moll who avoids gangsters and doesn't sell The Trib like Jean Seberg. The point is it's got the mood early Godard that played the downtown art houses of the 60s. Nersesian likes expletives in his titles. His latest novel, his fourteenth, is Shit Show. The book is a  totally different bag of apples, in which the author deftly displays his gift for imagining history, moving from the Stalinist Russia of the 40s to Woodstock, then  9/11. Nersesian's character Morosov even writes a more than competent poem ending with these lines: "Since there was no sign of heaven, God dropped them on the Syrian/Plains to let his vultures feed/They were the bread unleavened, his hateful creed." Here is a non sequitur from Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station: "In spite of Marx's enthusiasm for the human, he is either inhumanely dark and dead or almost superhumanly brilliant." 

read "Making the Graphic Novel Graphic" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn