Mesopotamia
More Critical Praise for Arthur Nersesian
For
dogrun
“Nersesian’s writing is beautiful, especially when it is about women and love.”
—Jennifer Belle, author of
High Maintenance
“A rich parody of the all-girl punk band.”
—
New York Times Book Review
“Nersesian’s blackly comic urban coming-of-angst tale offers a laugh in every paragraph.”
—
Glamour
“Darkly comic … It’s Nersesian’s love affair with lower Manhattan that sets these pages afire.”
—
Entertainment Weekly
For
Chinese Takeout
“Not since Henry Miller has a writer so successfully captured the trials and tribulations of a struggling artist … A masterly image.”
—
Library Journal
(starred review)
“One of the best books I’ve read about the artist’s life. Nersesian captures the obsession one needs to keep going under tough odds … trying to stay true to himself, and his struggle against the odds makes for a compelling read.”
—
Village Voice
“Nersesian weaves a heartfelt, tragicomic bohemian romance with echoes of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice … Infused with the symbolism of Greek legend, the hip squalor of this milieu takes on a mythic charge that energizes Nersesian’s lyrical celebration of an evanescent moment in the life of the city.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“Capturing in words the energy, dynamism, and exhaustion of creating visual art is a definite achievement. Setting the act of creation amidst Lower East Side filth, degradation, and hope, and making that environment a palpable, organic character in a novel confirms Nersesian’s literary artistry. His edgy exploration of the love of art and of life, and of the creative act and the sweat and toil inherent to it, is hard to put down.”
—
Booklist
For
Unlubricated
“Reading
Unlubricated
can make you feel like a commuter catapulting herself down the stairs to squeeze onto the A train before the doors close … In his paean to the perplexities of dislocation and discovery—both in bohemian life and in life at large—Nersesian makes us eager to see what happens when the curtain finally rises.”
—
New York Times Book Review
“Nersesian’s raw, smutty sensibility is perfect for capturing the gritty city artistic life, but this novel has as much substance as style … Nersesian continuously ratchets up the suspense, always keeping the fate of the production uncertain—and at the last minute he throws a curveball that makes the previous chaos calm by comparison. Nersesian is a first-rate observer of his native New York …”
—
Publishers Weekly
“Nersesian knows his territory intimately and paces the escalating chaos with a precision that would do Wodehouse proud.”
—
Time Out New York
For
Suicide Casanova
“Sleek, funny, and sometimes sickening … a porn nostalgia novel, if you will, a weepy nod to the sleaze pond that Times Square once was.”
—
Memphis Flyer
“Sick, depraved, and heartbreaking—in other words, a great read, a great book.
Suicide Casanova
is erotic noir and Nersesian’s hard-boiled prose comes at you like a jailhouse confession.”
—Jonathan Ames, author of
The Alcoholic
“Nersesian has written a scathingly original page-turner, hilarious, tragic, and shocking—this may be his most brilliant novel yet.”
—Kate Christensen, author of
Trouble
“… tight, gripping, erotic thriller …”
—
Philadelphia City Paper
“A vivid, compelling psycho-thriller … Nersesian’s unique psychological vision of the city rates with those of Paul Auster and Madison Smartt Bell.”
—Blake Nelson, author of
Girl
and
User
“Every budding author should read this book. Stop your creative writing class on the technique of Hemingway and study the elegant gritty prose of Nersesian. Stop your literary theory class on Faulkner and read the next generation of literary genius.”
—
Cherry Bleeds
“This is no traditional Romeo & Juliet love story. It is like no love story I’ve ever read, which is why it reads fast, deep, and intense … A great story by a talented writer.”
—
New Mystery Reviews
For
Manhattan Loverboy
“Best Book for the Beach, Summer 2000.”
—
Jane Magazine
“Best Indie Novel of 2000.”
—
Montreal Mirror
“Part Lewis Carroll, part Franz Kafka, Nersesian leads us down a maze of false leads and dead ends … told with wit and compassion, drawing the reader into a world of paranoia and coincidence while illuminating questions of free will and destiny. Highly recommended.”
—
Library Journal
“A tawdry and fantastic tale … Nersesian renders Gotham’s unique cocktail of wealth, poverty, crime, glamour, and brutality spectacularly.”
—
Rain Taxi Review of Books
“MLB
sits somewhere between Kafka, DeLillo, and Lovecraft—a terribly frightening, funny, and all too possible place.”
—
Literary Review of Canada
For
The Fuck-Up
“For those who remember that the ’80s were as much about destitute grit as they were about the decadent glitz described in the novels of Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, this book will come as a fast-paced reminder.”
—
Time Out New York
“The Fuck-Up
is
Trainspotting
without drugs, New York style.”
—Hal Sirowitz, author of
Mother Said
“Touted as the bottled essence of early-’80s East Village living,
The Fuck-Up
is, refreshingly, nothing nearly so limited … A cult favorite since its first, obscure printing in 1991, I’d say it’s ready to become a legitimate religion.”
—
Smug Magazine
“Not since
The Catcher in the Rye
, or John Knowles’s
A Separate Peace
, have I read such a beautifully written book … Nersesian’s powerful, sure-footed narrative alone is so believably human in its poignancy … I couldn’t put this book down.”
—
Grid Magazine
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
©2010 by Arthur Nersesian
ePUB ISBN-13: 978-1-936-07084-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-936070-08-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009939081
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
[email protected]
www.akashicbooks.com
Contents
to my uncles
Richard A. Burke
Patrick G. Burke
Thomas P. Burke
Michael F. Burke
Stephen U. Burke
… those were all the suicides that I could remember, all sad males (as I envisioned in tabloid headlines—an occupational hazard of working in this business). Women tend to be more passive in their self-annihilation. Accidental overdoses gradually slowing down their broken little hearts. Repeatedly peeking into ovens, à la Sylvia Plath, where the gas delicately overwhelms the oxygen and their last thoughts are regretting not using a better oven cleaner. Stressful jobs, loveless marriages, bad food—most people kill themselves slowly every day.
When I got fired from my marriage and divorced from my job, I found myself getting drunk and passing out too early. Then I’d wake up around two in the morning with only the unbearable emptiness of my miserable failure to keep me company. That was when I started with the sleeping pills.
None of this had anything to do with the seemingly happy, successful life of one Thucydides Scrubbs. His comely young wife Missy was probably too dumb to kill herself. At thirty-eight years old the African American tax attorney probably slept as soundly as the dead. At least he slept well until that fateful day in July 2005 when he returned to his posh two-million-dollar estate outside of Memphis, Tennessee, to find his allegedly pregnant, white teenage bride, Missy Scrubbs, missing. Four days after her disappearance, her mother notified the police. When they asked Thucydides why he didn’t call them, he replied that he simply thought she was visiting some friends upstate. Apparently she was from some podunk town between Memphis and Nashville, and this was where I started paying attention as I was raised in that very same area.
When the police examined Thucydides’s bank records, they discovered that a million dollars had been withdrawn from his account a few days before she vanished. He had no explanation and was an automatic suspect.
When they learned from the neighbors that Thucydides and his wife had been fighting on a regular basis, the police considered he might have used that money to hire a hit man. But a murder didn’t cost nearly that much. Some hypothesized that it might be a kidnapping. If that was the case, then Thucydides had probably been warned that if he involved the police, little Missy would be executed.
They interrogated Scrubbs at length. First alone, then with his nerdy counsel. When a local reporter broke the story that Scrubbs had been cheating on Missy with an even hotter, dumber blonde who worked on Beale Street, the gossip hit a fever pitch.
The titillating detail that tipped the story into the circus tent of tabloid land was something Missy’s middle-trash mother had done ten years earlier. She had entered little Missy into every children’s beauty pageant from Texarkana, Texas, to Biloxi, Mississippi. As fate would have it, she looked uncannily like Jon-Benét Ramsey. That, along with the fact that Scrubbs looked vaguely like a short, stocky O.J. Simpson, didn’t help. Aspects of these two highly publicized cases with poorly resolved endings were natural fodder for the always hungry ’bloids.