The Fuck-Up

No simple tale of psychopathic yuppie greed, The Fuck-Up is a thriller with a literary soul set in the pre-chic lower east side. The narrative follows a nameless hero from the girlfriend who kicks him out for a most minor infidelity, to dismissal from his minimum wage usher job at a movie theater, to a literary friend's couch in Caroll Gardens, and back to Manhattan for a short-lived squat in a plush Soho loft and an entirely unorthodox management position in a gay porn theater. On this fast track to the frayed edges of city life, he encounters a humbling constellation of personalities and hostilities that accelerate the pace of his deterioration. As he makes this emotional and socio-economic odyssey through New York's colorful if uncaring landscape, rarely with more than enough change for a cup of coffee at a Blimpie, he becomes embroiled in affairs and relationships built on mutual deceit and predicated on misinformation. The result is a descent into the world of the truly fucked up, a semi-delirious and amnesiac wandering that finds an end not in some predictable and cuddly redemption but in the solace of shared disillusion. The Fuck-Up is a must for any smugly self-satisfied downtown New Yorker, and an important addition to the canon of writing about New York. Reading like a travel guide to New York circa 1983 annotated by Abbie Hoffman, The Fuck-Up conjures the exact names, specific establishments and precise addresses of an almost forgotten city. From the St. Mark's Theater to Caramba! on Broadway to the missions on the Bowery, Nersesian's careful and affectionate historicism has distilled and preserved a moment overlooked by and unimaginable to Ellis, McInerney and the other pop chroniclers of the era.

Library Journal

Okay, the narrator really is a fuck-up. Barely employed as an usher at a Village cinema, he falls for a colleague who seems dewily innocent even as he continues dumping his dirty clothes on girlfriend Sarah's floor. Then all in one day he loses his job, his chance for new love, and Sarah herself and winds up sleeping on the coach of a friend who's probably even more of a fuck-up than he is. From here he moves swiftly through trying to score, trying to keep his job at a porno theater by pretending that he's gay, and somehow getting himself involved in a robbery. Nersesian, a former editor at a literary magazine called The Portable Lower East Side and an English instructor at a community college in the Bronx, writes briskly and acutely, with a good sense of detail. At least he's not a fuck-up. But this isn't exactly the "slice of gritty New York life" promised on the cover. Despite the narrator's many astonishing escapades, it's really kind of bland.--Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Arthur Nersesian is the author of eight novels, including the smash hit The Fuck-Up (more than 100,000 copies sold), Dogrun, Suicide Casanova (Akashic), and, most recently, The Swing Voter of Staten Island, which is the first volume in a series, The Five Books of Moses. He lives in New York City.