What do you think?
Rate this book
The Five Books of [Robert] Moses
A dramatic, playful, brutal, sweeping, and always entertaining reimagining of New York City history, presaging today’s political tyranny.
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.
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.
1510 pages, Hardcover
Published July 28, 2020
35 people are currently reading
361 people want to read
About the author
Arthur Nersesian
35 books381 followersArthur Nersesian is the author of eight novels, including The Fuck-Up (Akashic, 1997 & MTV Books/Simon & Schuster, 1999), Chinese Takeout (HarperCollins), Manhattan Loverboy (Akashic), Suicide Casanova (Akashic), dogrun (MTV Books/Simon & Schuster), and Unlubricated (HarperCollins). He is also the author of East Village Tetralogy, a collection of four plays. He lives in New York City.
From arthurnersesian.com:
www.arthurnersesian.com/
"Arthur Nersesian is a real New York writer. His novels are a celebration
of marginal characters living in the East Village and trying to survive.
Nersesian's books include The Fuck-Up, The East Village Tetralogy, and now just published by a small press based in New York, Manhattan Loverboy. Nersesian has been a fixture in the writing scene for many years. He was an editor for The Portable Lower East Side, which was an important magazine during the 1980s and early 90s.
When The Fuck-Up came out in 1997, MTV Books picked it up and reprinted it in a new edition for hipsters everywhere. Soon Nersesian was no longer known only to a cabal of young bohemians on Avenue A. His work has been championed by The Village Voice and Time Out."
From arthurnersesian.com:
www.arthurnersesian.com/
"Arthur Nersesian is a real New York writer. His novels are a celebration
of marginal characters living in the East Village and trying to survive.
Nersesian's books include The Fuck-Up, The East Village Tetralogy, and now just published by a small press based in New York, Manhattan Loverboy. Nersesian has been a fixture in the writing scene for many years. He was an editor for The Portable Lower East Side, which was an important magazine during the 1980s and early 90s.
When The Fuck-Up came out in 1997, MTV Books picked it up and reprinted it in a new edition for hipsters everywhere. Soon Nersesian was no longer known only to a cabal of young bohemians on Avenue A. His work has been championed by The Village Voice and Time Out."
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
September 8, 2020
It's appropriate enough to be deemed a prime marketing advantage to point out that, three weeks before this novel was published, during the early summer days of protests against statues that followed the George Floyd unrest, several hundred protesters gathered in Babylon, NY to demand that a statue of Robert Moses be dismantled. It's astonishing to think that this statue was only erected in the early 2000s, long after activists and architects agreed that bureaucratic planner Robert Moses, far from being a savior of New York, did more than anyone else to destroy its character in the mid decades of the 20th century. Nersesian, like everyone else in modern society, is no fan of Robert Moses. Yet Robert Moses's visage, and that of his dysfunctional family members, haunts nearly every page of this 1500-page book, in both quasi-historical and totally fictitious form. And yet, this is not a book about Robert Moses, except in a very tangential and accidental way.
***
In 2015, when I reviewed City On Fire, Garth Risk Hallberg's 900-page opus to New York City in 1977, I gave it a full five stars, even though the book lacked the jaw-dropping profundity of a work by, say, Pynchon or Foster Wallace. The fact that such a young writer could get the emotion of New York in the punk era exactly right made it miraculous in its own right. Nersesian set out to conjure a far weirder and more speculative view of a New York City that might have been real, and an alternate New York City which could never be real. Again, the book does not carry the profundity of a "great work," though the action and bizarre twists never stop. The marketing blurb on the dust jacket suggests the novel melds William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick, though I might suggest Dick and Vonnegut, since it never meanders into the full-tilt surreality of a Burroughs work. This book was a two-month rollicking coaster ride I could recommend to any fan of alternative histories or speculative fiction.
Still, there were a couple wrinkles that kept me from giving it a full five stars, though it deserves a very high four stars. Part of it relates to Nersesian's wild writing style. Some may find the violence gratuitous, though no more so than Stephen King or Cormac McCarthy. Although the book tries to handle gender reassignment and lesbian relationships in fair ways, some may find certain passages trans-phobic, though I would disagree. It is simply the case that Nersesian is an old-school NYC rowdy, writing in an era of hyper-sensitivity, and I am inclined to forgive him. Another problem is related to the very nature of alternative histories. Here, I hesitate to ask the obvious question, "What is the alternative history for?" as the appropriate response in many cases is "For the hell of it." The best alternative histories can have a clear arc, such as William Gibson's and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine, a fine alternative narrative of the U.S. Civil War and Lady Ada Lovelace. Other alternative histories seem devoid of any purpose at all, like Mark Binelli's Screamin' Jay Hawkins' All-Time Greatest Hits. I wasn't looking for a grand meaning here, but if Nersesian is going to play around with figures like Emmet Grogan, Abbie Hoffman, Woodward and Bernstein, and the Andy Warhol film stars, he needs to be a little bit careful. Would the still-living Mark Rudd, for example, approve of the way Nersesian characterized his morphing from SDS to Weather Underground? Similarly, one might make up events out of whole cloth, but when one fabricates partially true events, it can lead to an evidential mess. For example, Nersesian has FBI agent Uli Sarkisian make attempts to infiltrate CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) before Sarkisian went to Wounded Knee in 1973 for the AIM occupation. The problem is that U.S. activists interested in Latin America in 1972 worked solely with NACLA or various Chile solidarity groups, because CISPES did not even exist prior to 1980. Do such details matter in a work of fiction? I would argue that they do, and Nersesian takes a few too many liberties - akin to Bob Woodward, in his supposed nonfiction books of the White House, admitting to making up some conversations out of thin air.
The five "books" of this novel each match up to a borough of New York, even though the bulk of the book takes place within a fake New York called Rescue City, created in the Nevada desert in 1971, after the real New York is made unliveable through a slow dissipation of low-level radiation. The book centers on Uli Sarkisian and his sister, former radical Karen Sarkisian, and their adventures navigating the politics of the new Rescue City.
In the first book, "The Swing Voter of Staten Island," Uli is an amnesiac Manchurian candidate set loose in Rescue City, observing events taking place at breakneck pace. We learn through Sarkisian that the city is divided into two gang-related political parties, the Piggers in control of Queens and The Bronx, and the Crappers in charge of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Staten Island alone is run by an anarchist collective forced to live next to the toxic sewage overflows of the other four boroughs. The book concludes with Sarkisian being thrust into an underground extension of Rescue City that few seem to know about, and even fewer escape.
The second book, "The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx," introduces Robert Moses' disgruntled older brother Paul, whose life story is told through a series of hallucinations undergone by Uli as he explores the underground maze of "MKUltra" (the actual name of the CIA's hallucinogenic drug experiments). This portion of the novel is told lucidly, as we see Paul and Robert move through the New York of the early 2oth century.
Book Three, "The Terrible Beauty of Brooklyn," is perhaps the toughest read, as we see one political party in Rescue City groom the "Andy Warhol Superstars" in order to win a newly conquered "Quirklyn," an area akin to the northeast Brooklyn/JFK Airport region in the real NYC. The story shifts from hilarious to horrific at several points, but we ultimately wonder what the battle for Quirklyn is about. What are the Piggers and Crappers gaining? Maybe Nersesian is mocking the useless internal politics of the real New York City since 1970 or so, but it comes across as strange.
Another passage of lucidity is found in Book Four, "The Postmorphogenesis of Manhattan," where we learn how Uli's sister Karen became a member of SDS at Columbia University, and ultimately a member of Weather Underground. In the weeks following the very real accidental bombing of a brownstone by Weather in March 1970, Nersesian takes us to an imaginary world where a second radioactive disaster, tied in with Paul and Robert Moses, requires all five boroughs of the city to be evacuated. The founding of Rescue City in 1971 is explained, and the reader learns that the events that occupy most of the novel take place in an imagined 1980-81, one in which Watergate never happened, Nixon served two full terms, and was succeeded by Ronald Reagan.
In the final book, "The Cognitive Contagion of Queens," Uli and Karen are at last reunited, Rescue City is collapsing to an inglorious end, but its residents learn they will have no place guaranteed to them in a decontaminated New York City. Instead, everyone must find their own way out of the Nevada desert through scenes of war and pestilence. It is interesting to note that twice in the book, first in a radioactively contaminated New York and later in a Rescue City subject to multiple pandemics, Nersesian describes a society wearing face masks and engaging in social distancing, in pages that could have been ripped from 2020 CDC guidance. Yet Nersesian sent the final version of the novel to his copy editor in mid-2019. Sure, such prescience could have been shown by anyone who had studied the 1918-19 flu pandemic, but it nevertheless felt eerie, reading this book in 2020.
The final efforts to escape Rescue City and learn what is left of civilization provide an exciting climax, and make it more than worth the effort to slog through 1500 pages. In fact, the layout of the book and its illustrations make it easy to accomplish, even if a very long task. One might, in the end, compare it to one of King's longer horror novels The Stand, for example, not in any similarity of plot line, but because no one ever asked King what his purpose in writing such long works was. They were stories, nothing more. Perhaps there is a moral buried in how New York was emptied out and reimagined in the Nevada desert. The fact that private corporations proved more resilient than the government provides a clue that maybe Nersesian sees this as a gruesome amusement park writ large. Or maybe it's a story, nothing more.
***
In 2015, when I reviewed City On Fire, Garth Risk Hallberg's 900-page opus to New York City in 1977, I gave it a full five stars, even though the book lacked the jaw-dropping profundity of a work by, say, Pynchon or Foster Wallace. The fact that such a young writer could get the emotion of New York in the punk era exactly right made it miraculous in its own right. Nersesian set out to conjure a far weirder and more speculative view of a New York City that might have been real, and an alternate New York City which could never be real. Again, the book does not carry the profundity of a "great work," though the action and bizarre twists never stop. The marketing blurb on the dust jacket suggests the novel melds William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick, though I might suggest Dick and Vonnegut, since it never meanders into the full-tilt surreality of a Burroughs work. This book was a two-month rollicking coaster ride I could recommend to any fan of alternative histories or speculative fiction.
Still, there were a couple wrinkles that kept me from giving it a full five stars, though it deserves a very high four stars. Part of it relates to Nersesian's wild writing style. Some may find the violence gratuitous, though no more so than Stephen King or Cormac McCarthy. Although the book tries to handle gender reassignment and lesbian relationships in fair ways, some may find certain passages trans-phobic, though I would disagree. It is simply the case that Nersesian is an old-school NYC rowdy, writing in an era of hyper-sensitivity, and I am inclined to forgive him. Another problem is related to the very nature of alternative histories. Here, I hesitate to ask the obvious question, "What is the alternative history for?" as the appropriate response in many cases is "For the hell of it." The best alternative histories can have a clear arc, such as William Gibson's and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine, a fine alternative narrative of the U.S. Civil War and Lady Ada Lovelace. Other alternative histories seem devoid of any purpose at all, like Mark Binelli's Screamin' Jay Hawkins' All-Time Greatest Hits. I wasn't looking for a grand meaning here, but if Nersesian is going to play around with figures like Emmet Grogan, Abbie Hoffman, Woodward and Bernstein, and the Andy Warhol film stars, he needs to be a little bit careful. Would the still-living Mark Rudd, for example, approve of the way Nersesian characterized his morphing from SDS to Weather Underground? Similarly, one might make up events out of whole cloth, but when one fabricates partially true events, it can lead to an evidential mess. For example, Nersesian has FBI agent Uli Sarkisian make attempts to infiltrate CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) before Sarkisian went to Wounded Knee in 1973 for the AIM occupation. The problem is that U.S. activists interested in Latin America in 1972 worked solely with NACLA or various Chile solidarity groups, because CISPES did not even exist prior to 1980. Do such details matter in a work of fiction? I would argue that they do, and Nersesian takes a few too many liberties - akin to Bob Woodward, in his supposed nonfiction books of the White House, admitting to making up some conversations out of thin air.
The five "books" of this novel each match up to a borough of New York, even though the bulk of the book takes place within a fake New York called Rescue City, created in the Nevada desert in 1971, after the real New York is made unliveable through a slow dissipation of low-level radiation. The book centers on Uli Sarkisian and his sister, former radical Karen Sarkisian, and their adventures navigating the politics of the new Rescue City.
In the first book, "The Swing Voter of Staten Island," Uli is an amnesiac Manchurian candidate set loose in Rescue City, observing events taking place at breakneck pace. We learn through Sarkisian that the city is divided into two gang-related political parties, the Piggers in control of Queens and The Bronx, and the Crappers in charge of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Staten Island alone is run by an anarchist collective forced to live next to the toxic sewage overflows of the other four boroughs. The book concludes with Sarkisian being thrust into an underground extension of Rescue City that few seem to know about, and even fewer escape.
The second book, "The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx," introduces Robert Moses' disgruntled older brother Paul, whose life story is told through a series of hallucinations undergone by Uli as he explores the underground maze of "MKUltra" (the actual name of the CIA's hallucinogenic drug experiments). This portion of the novel is told lucidly, as we see Paul and Robert move through the New York of the early 2oth century.
Book Three, "The Terrible Beauty of Brooklyn," is perhaps the toughest read, as we see one political party in Rescue City groom the "Andy Warhol Superstars" in order to win a newly conquered "Quirklyn," an area akin to the northeast Brooklyn/JFK Airport region in the real NYC. The story shifts from hilarious to horrific at several points, but we ultimately wonder what the battle for Quirklyn is about. What are the Piggers and Crappers gaining? Maybe Nersesian is mocking the useless internal politics of the real New York City since 1970 or so, but it comes across as strange.
Another passage of lucidity is found in Book Four, "The Postmorphogenesis of Manhattan," where we learn how Uli's sister Karen became a member of SDS at Columbia University, and ultimately a member of Weather Underground. In the weeks following the very real accidental bombing of a brownstone by Weather in March 1970, Nersesian takes us to an imaginary world where a second radioactive disaster, tied in with Paul and Robert Moses, requires all five boroughs of the city to be evacuated. The founding of Rescue City in 1971 is explained, and the reader learns that the events that occupy most of the novel take place in an imagined 1980-81, one in which Watergate never happened, Nixon served two full terms, and was succeeded by Ronald Reagan.
In the final book, "The Cognitive Contagion of Queens," Uli and Karen are at last reunited, Rescue City is collapsing to an inglorious end, but its residents learn they will have no place guaranteed to them in a decontaminated New York City. Instead, everyone must find their own way out of the Nevada desert through scenes of war and pestilence. It is interesting to note that twice in the book, first in a radioactively contaminated New York and later in a Rescue City subject to multiple pandemics, Nersesian describes a society wearing face masks and engaging in social distancing, in pages that could have been ripped from 2020 CDC guidance. Yet Nersesian sent the final version of the novel to his copy editor in mid-2019. Sure, such prescience could have been shown by anyone who had studied the 1918-19 flu pandemic, but it nevertheless felt eerie, reading this book in 2020.
The final efforts to escape Rescue City and learn what is left of civilization provide an exciting climax, and make it more than worth the effort to slog through 1500 pages. In fact, the layout of the book and its illustrations make it easy to accomplish, even if a very long task. One might, in the end, compare it to one of King's longer horror novels The Stand, for example, not in any similarity of plot line, but because no one ever asked King what his purpose in writing such long works was. They were stories, nothing more. Perhaps there is a moral buried in how New York was emptied out and reimagined in the Nevada desert. The fact that private corporations proved more resilient than the government provides a clue that maybe Nersesian sees this as a gruesome amusement park writ large. Or maybe it's a story, nothing more.
September 7, 2020
I recently finished this beautiful saga and severely miss so many of the beautiful and multi dimensional characters. It was the perfect summer read! Or vacay. Or get us through Covid epic novel!
The Five Books of Moses resurrects forgotten New York figures in history and weaves them into living, breathing work. In much the same way that Westerns take historic charactes, like Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid and turns them into heroic gunfighters, Nersesian has located an impressive list of obscure cultural figures and given them a three-dimensional vitality that stay with you, long after this compelling epic is finished. People like Stonewall champion Marsha P. Johnson, poet Joe Brainard, performer Jackie Curtis, Writer Cookie Mueller and so many others whose names are brought together, each playing a vital role in a tightly plotted story that essentially is about the value of culture and it's importance in civil liberties and freedom.
There are incredibly detailed illustrations and sketches throughout that are phenomenal in and of themselves. I really loved the way they lent themselves to the gritty feel of the novel.
The author is a master at capturing the essence of NYC and the highly charged political climates of the current times. It would make an excellent flick or mini series. Please someone make this film! . I can’t wait to see these characters be brought to life someday.
Also the five book titles may be one of my favorite things. From “the swing voter of Staten Island” to “the terrible beauty of Brooklyn”.. I’ll let you discover the rest on your own but .. those titles give you a glimpse of the authors very poetic and fluid use of words. This is my first read by Mr Nersesian. Rest assured , I will be coming back for more !
The Five Books of Moses resurrects forgotten New York figures in history and weaves them into living, breathing work. In much the same way that Westerns take historic charactes, like Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid and turns them into heroic gunfighters, Nersesian has located an impressive list of obscure cultural figures and given them a three-dimensional vitality that stay with you, long after this compelling epic is finished. People like Stonewall champion Marsha P. Johnson, poet Joe Brainard, performer Jackie Curtis, Writer Cookie Mueller and so many others whose names are brought together, each playing a vital role in a tightly plotted story that essentially is about the value of culture and it's importance in civil liberties and freedom.
There are incredibly detailed illustrations and sketches throughout that are phenomenal in and of themselves. I really loved the way they lent themselves to the gritty feel of the novel.
The author is a master at capturing the essence of NYC and the highly charged political climates of the current times. It would make an excellent flick or mini series. Please someone make this film! . I can’t wait to see these characters be brought to life someday.
Also the five book titles may be one of my favorite things. From “the swing voter of Staten Island” to “the terrible beauty of Brooklyn”.. I’ll let you discover the rest on your own but .. those titles give you a glimpse of the authors very poetic and fluid use of words. This is my first read by Mr Nersesian. Rest assured , I will be coming back for more !
Read
November 22, 2023Given how long some books sit on my shelves before I finally get to them, the fact that I am picking up this 1500 page book only a year after I bought it (and when it was published) and tackling it means something I think. It doesn't hurt that earlier this year I read The Power Broker for the first time, Robert Caro's 1200 page book about Robert Moses's life and career as the (often extra legal) architect of New York. How that basically worked was that Robert Moses used a corporate shell company to help pay for the Tri-Borough-Bridge, and then ran funding for other projects through that company regardless of the legal authority to do so by one of the many unelected posts he held at various points of his career. Through legal manipulation and brazen political gaming, he was able to impose his will on the landscape of New York City and very rarely lost any battle he chose to take on. Whenever he did happen to lose, he often enacted a petty revenge soon thereafter. For example, when it took the full force of the presidency and the department of war to stop him from enclosing New York harbor with a bridge, he destroyed the Battery Park aquarium and killed most of the fish there.
So that's our background for this novel. The novel takes place in the early 90s or late 80s. In 1970, a dirty bomb irradiated most of New York making it unliveable. The federal government relocated the vast majority of the inhabitants to an ersatz New York City in Nevada called "Rescue City" that recreated facsimilies of the city's most famous spaces in the desert, including creating the various waterways in the desert. When the water quickly became polluted and with little connection to the outside world the population soon became trapped, and the resulting breakdown of the goverment led to warring gangs taking up control in the resultant power vacuum. Our story begins with Uli Sarkisian coming to in this world with vague memories of the world around him and some set of mission parameters repeating in his brain. We are as lost as he is as his limited ability to make sense of the world is our only narration for a while. But once all of us get a hang of things and the shape of the world settles in, we begin to understand the power structures and plot at play.
Later, Uli begins to have some kind of lucid dream about Paul Moses, the older brother of Robert Moses. From Caro's book, what you learn about Paul Moses is that he was an electrical engineer who had a tenditious relationship with his family, especially his mother. When he was disinhereited, Paul seemed to believe his brother Robert was responsible. Left only with minor investment holdings in the summer of 1929, Paul found various kinds of work related to engineering, but losing out a coveted appointment, he believed his brother again blocked him. We also know that Robert had control over the very meager investmentsn Paul had into his older age. This lucid dream takes this shell we know and expands upon it with Paul's early life at Princeton, being conscripted into the Mexican revolution, being married twice, having a child and growing old. How much of this is invented for the novel is not clear to the otherwise ignorant reader, and I won't be looking it up until after this book has settled in my mind. But taking one of the most famous New Yorkers of all time, and viewing him only through the eyes of a jealous and resentful brother is inventive way to frame this alternate history.
And that only takes us through 40% of the novel (600 pages!).
Book 1 of this novel begins with Uli wandering around Rescue City as both him and the reader become acquainted with the new world, the various plots, and wandering in what feels like a haze.
Book 2 gives us the duel-story of Uli and Paul Moses sharing a kind of memory transference (one way from Paul to Uli) while Uli also is following a possible lead to escape the city.
Book 3 gives us a local election in the space between Brooklyn and Queens where a third party being nominally represented by former Andy Warhol film stars try to unwrench the grips of the two primary warring gangs.
Book 4 gives us a lot of the gaps and backstory to book 1 and 2 by retelling many of the same events through the eyes of a different character, while continually tying loose ends together.
Book 5 gives gives us ultimately the conclusion of all the different storylines, but before that, we finally get the background to Uli's work with the FBI and the different things that led him to Rescue City.
The effect of all of these different books is a spiralling effect where gaps are slowly filled in in the narrative leading to the main story, which happens to be the relatively simply story of families once divided trying to reunite, both physically and emotionally.
So what is reading this book like? Here's some of the various influences and parallels I thought about while I was reading this. The most obvious of course is Robert Caro's The Power Broker. Additionally: Samuel Delany's Dhalgren, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Thomas Pynchon's V, Vineland, and The Crying of Lot 49, Rick Perlstein's books, Bernard Malamud's The Tenants, Joan Didion and Susan Sontag nonfiction, various JG Ballard, and some William Gibson and Neal Stephenson thrown in. I don't quite think the Philip Dick and William Burroughs comparisons quite work.
So that's our background for this novel. The novel takes place in the early 90s or late 80s. In 1970, a dirty bomb irradiated most of New York making it unliveable. The federal government relocated the vast majority of the inhabitants to an ersatz New York City in Nevada called "Rescue City" that recreated facsimilies of the city's most famous spaces in the desert, including creating the various waterways in the desert. When the water quickly became polluted and with little connection to the outside world the population soon became trapped, and the resulting breakdown of the goverment led to warring gangs taking up control in the resultant power vacuum. Our story begins with Uli Sarkisian coming to in this world with vague memories of the world around him and some set of mission parameters repeating in his brain. We are as lost as he is as his limited ability to make sense of the world is our only narration for a while. But once all of us get a hang of things and the shape of the world settles in, we begin to understand the power structures and plot at play.
Later, Uli begins to have some kind of lucid dream about Paul Moses, the older brother of Robert Moses. From Caro's book, what you learn about Paul Moses is that he was an electrical engineer who had a tenditious relationship with his family, especially his mother. When he was disinhereited, Paul seemed to believe his brother Robert was responsible. Left only with minor investment holdings in the summer of 1929, Paul found various kinds of work related to engineering, but losing out a coveted appointment, he believed his brother again blocked him. We also know that Robert had control over the very meager investmentsn Paul had into his older age. This lucid dream takes this shell we know and expands upon it with Paul's early life at Princeton, being conscripted into the Mexican revolution, being married twice, having a child and growing old. How much of this is invented for the novel is not clear to the otherwise ignorant reader, and I won't be looking it up until after this book has settled in my mind. But taking one of the most famous New Yorkers of all time, and viewing him only through the eyes of a jealous and resentful brother is inventive way to frame this alternate history.
And that only takes us through 40% of the novel (600 pages!).
Book 1 of this novel begins with Uli wandering around Rescue City as both him and the reader become acquainted with the new world, the various plots, and wandering in what feels like a haze.
Book 2 gives us the duel-story of Uli and Paul Moses sharing a kind of memory transference (one way from Paul to Uli) while Uli also is following a possible lead to escape the city.
Book 3 gives us a local election in the space between Brooklyn and Queens where a third party being nominally represented by former Andy Warhol film stars try to unwrench the grips of the two primary warring gangs.
Book 4 gives us a lot of the gaps and backstory to book 1 and 2 by retelling many of the same events through the eyes of a different character, while continually tying loose ends together.
Book 5 gives gives us ultimately the conclusion of all the different storylines, but before that, we finally get the background to Uli's work with the FBI and the different things that led him to Rescue City.
The effect of all of these different books is a spiralling effect where gaps are slowly filled in in the narrative leading to the main story, which happens to be the relatively simply story of families once divided trying to reunite, both physically and emotionally.
So what is reading this book like? Here's some of the various influences and parallels I thought about while I was reading this. The most obvious of course is Robert Caro's The Power Broker. Additionally: Samuel Delany's Dhalgren, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Thomas Pynchon's V, Vineland, and The Crying of Lot 49, Rick Perlstein's books, Bernard Malamud's The Tenants, Joan Didion and Susan Sontag nonfiction, various JG Ballard, and some William Gibson and Neal Stephenson thrown in. I don't quite think the Philip Dick and William Burroughs comparisons quite work.
July 26, 2023
This book was incredible
July 16, 2025
Phew- I made it! Quite the story arc and an impressive cast of characters. Ran out of steam by the end, but overall enjoyed this book. Fairly certain it's the longest novel I've ever read!
March 4, 2021
I'm honestly at a bit of a loss with this book. It starts out with a heavy Phillip K. Dick vibe - flat writing, odd interactions between characters, and a plot that's just one damn thing after another. It's compelling, but kind of aimless. And then Paul and Robert Moses appear and a few pages later, Paul is sabotaging a train in Mexico and things go downhill from there.
A thousand pages in or so, Nersesian starts to tie all the random pieces together, sort of, and it's still all very compelling and then the last hundred pages are a death march in multiple ways and then the whole thing just sort of ends. I don't know if I'm infuriated by it all or not. I don't know what to think.
There's a lot of bad writing in this book, and some bits that are absolutely cringeworthy, but it somehow does manage to work, and work well. There are so many different themes and ideas layered together here and it's hard to say what it means or if it means anything at all.
This may or may not be a good book, but you should read it.
A thousand pages in or so, Nersesian starts to tie all the random pieces together, sort of, and it's still all very compelling and then the last hundred pages are a death march in multiple ways and then the whole thing just sort of ends. I don't know if I'm infuriated by it all or not. I don't know what to think.
There's a lot of bad writing in this book, and some bits that are absolutely cringeworthy, but it somehow does manage to work, and work well. There are so many different themes and ideas layered together here and it's hard to say what it means or if it means anything at all.
This may or may not be a good book, but you should read it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Read
August 18, 2024one extra star because i respect the grind. 1500 pages is no joke. Also, i only read the first “book” of five
This book is a schizophrenic mess. Until the end of the first book I couldn’t actually figure out what the “plot” was. Why is there so much weird callouts. How many times are we gonna do the joke of renaming nyc landmarks. Why is the plot the way it is???? Where even are the characters??? They’re in Nevada? I thought it was New York? They blew up New York to send all of the people to a fake New York in Nevada? Why???
This book is a schizophrenic mess. Until the end of the first book I couldn’t actually figure out what the “plot” was. Why is there so much weird callouts. How many times are we gonna do the joke of renaming nyc landmarks. Why is the plot the way it is???? Where even are the characters??? They’re in Nevada? I thought it was New York? They blew up New York to send all of the people to a fake New York in Nevada? Why???
August 29, 2020
If you're looking to read something eerily reminiscent of current events and also nostalgia of New York and it's enclave of artist and personalities than I highly recommend it. A very engaging book and relevant to our times. The style is very eclectic and has touches of sci-fi and history. I enjoyed it immensely.
December 3, 2021
I did it. I finished. I made it. Just like Moses in the desert. So, this was long, it was a journey. I liked it, I bought in, I cared about the characters, the mysteries, and was taken along, but it was long. Oh, so very long. And I am not sure that it needed to be or that it added to my experience with the story.
June 26, 2020
**I received an ARC of this book from Edelweiss**
4/5
I previously read the first two books of this five book pentalogy more than a decade ago and never expected that it would ever be finished. But, here it is and it was worth the wait.
The Five Books of (Robert) Moses follows our amnesiac hero, Uli, as he explores Rescue City, a NYC replica recreated in the Nevada desert after NYC proper was irradiated with radioactive material. Rescue City is violently run by two opposing political parties, the Piggers and Crappers. Along the way, Uli runs into a cast of characters, some historical, some fictional, as he tries to figure out his purpose in Rescue City.
Imagine an alternate history of NYC set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland in the Nevada desert. Something like Escape From New York written by William S. Burroughs. Delightfully strange. I loved it.
4/5
I previously read the first two books of this five book pentalogy more than a decade ago and never expected that it would ever be finished. But, here it is and it was worth the wait.
The Five Books of (Robert) Moses follows our amnesiac hero, Uli, as he explores Rescue City, a NYC replica recreated in the Nevada desert after NYC proper was irradiated with radioactive material. Rescue City is violently run by two opposing political parties, the Piggers and Crappers. Along the way, Uli runs into a cast of characters, some historical, some fictional, as he tries to figure out his purpose in Rescue City.
Imagine an alternate history of NYC set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland in the Nevada desert. Something like Escape From New York written by William S. Burroughs. Delightfully strange. I loved it.
November 29, 2020
wow, 1500 pages, but it went by fast.. Sci Fi? History lesson of NY City... all fascinating if you don't mind hefting this book around and remembering all the names of the players. Quite fascinating though.. wondering when he wrote the last book because it's too prescient.
still a powerful book
still a powerful book
June 28, 2023
i’ll never forget this book for all the wrong reasons
October 31, 2023
Well that was… bizarre.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews