AN INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR NERSESIAN
Bookslut, IL
Dec 10 2007
Remember Escape From New York? That movie where Snake is sent into
the post apocalyptic detention city to rescue the president? Yeah,
that one. Now set aside the bad taste in your mouth and look at
another re-imagining of the city.
Arthur Nersesian’s The Swing Voter of Staten Island begins with an
amnesiac assassin’s arrival in the Rescue City of New York, Nevada,
where all the draft dodgers, convicts and the homeless have been
shipped after a terrorist attack on the real New York City. No
thanks to Nixon, Rescue City is plagued by a gang war between the
two presiding political parties, the Piggers and the Crappers, and
everyone inside wants out.
Nersesian’s new novel is a major departure from his previous works,
which dealt with artists of varying degrees living their lives.
Having delved into the world of alternate histories, Nersesian
explained his novel over French toast and coffee in New York’s East
Village.
The book was very reminiscent of Jamestown.
I actually bumped into Matthew Sharpe about six months ago, and I said
"I gotta warn you — full disclosure — I just wrote a novel where
Manhattan and Brooklyn are allies in a war. I don’t think anybody
will make any real parallels to your book though."
Why did you decide to write an alternate history novel this time
around?
The book really took a long time to gestate and evolve. It started
as almost scifi-ish, like a Samuel R. Delany novel. I really wanted
to do a book that deals with some group inside of a country that was
going through some kind of oppression. The initial draft dealt with
an African American culture a little bit, and there were no proper
nouns. It wasn’t America, it wasn’t set in any time, and it wasn’t
set in any place. It was just very free-floating, and that was the
problem with the book. I’m Armenian, and I guess as a member of a
group that was to some degree at the mercy of a host country of a
different culture (Armenians underwent the genocide in Turkey) and
seeing that with other countries and other peoples like the Native
Americans and other subgroups in America, other groups that had been
persecuted to ethnic or even sexual orientation, that was sort of the
original idea, just studying that and the insulation and isolation
of a group inside of itself.
I began the book in the early ’90s, and I’d show it to different
friends, my own kitchen cabinet of readers. I wasn’t getting
particularly positive responses. I would periodically go back to it
off and on. It wasn’t until 9/11 and then New Orleans and things that
I never thought were really possible started happening that I picked
it up again. I thought this book wasn’t suddenly far-fetched. Fiction
is usually out of the norm, and it should be, but this was not as
far out of the norm today as it would have been initially.
The only thing that comes immediately to mind as far as a fiction
writer who might have tackled this a little bit in terms of dimension
was Camus with The Plague. There’s no isolation and so-forth, so
it goes into a different territory. That’s what I remember reading
when I first wrote the book in the early ’90s. Other than that it
was just really kind of mixing and matching, finding what worked and
what didn’t, and finally plugging it into a history that really did
reflect our own time.
Why did you set Rescue City in Nevada?
That was really just research. I read that the federal government,
outside of Alaska, owns more private property in Nevada than anywhere
else, and the fact that there’s a desert really allows for the
isolation aspect. I was thinking of Utah as well because there’s a
desert community there. In the book, Rescue City is reshaped from a
military situation city. There really is a military situation city in
the Utah desert called German Village, but Rescue City seemed more
isolated. You’re kind of stuck, and a lot of these people want to
get out.
There’s a very ominous ending here. Does that leave room for a sequel?
There is a sequel to this, and it actually goes back in time and kind
of in a different direction. Not all is as it seems, and the book
actually deals more with history. It deals with Robert Moses, who
built so much of New York and was responsible for so many highways
and the UN being placed here. It’s fascinating, the itemization of
everything, but he was sort of a fascist in the process. He had a
brother who was also kind of a brilliant engineer, and he totally
thwarted his career. It becomes the basis for the big attack, and
it loops into the whole terrorist thing and the sixties and so on. I
can tell you more, but that would just give it away.
Did you have the sequel in mind while writing The Swing Voter of
Staten Island?
This was initially one pretty big book, and some of it has to do
with basic marketing. I showed it to my agent, and I showed it to
my editor at Akashic, and the idea was that in the rewriting of it,
I realized I could probably take off five to seven years and really
bring it into a solitary forum. But there were so many writers who
have been really serializing or multi-volumizing one work. I kind
of liked that. When I was in my teens I read Lord of the Rings,
and there are so many others like Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series.
The point is I’d just love to do that. Instead of sitting down and
writing it as one big book, I realized it was easier to do this
in parts.
I’m just finishing the second draft of the second book, and I’m trying
to give it to my publisher before the year is through.
How did the experience of writing this differ from The Fuck-Up and
Suicide Casanova?
Actually greatly. Those books are very different. They’re set in a
very specific time in New York in the last ten years with a fairly
recognizable group of characters, usually artists. My last three before
this were all artists. One was an actress, another a painter and then
a writer, so this is a departure for me. I really found myself using a
whole different palate of colors and a new criteria for how I usually
write. I wasn’t able to pull at my comfortable routines for this one.
I heard a mutual friend of ours inspired a character in Suicide
Casanova.
Maybe after the fact. I began that in the early ’90s, and I didn’t
meet him until early 2007. Any obsessive, sexual creature can find
himself in there. Truman Capote kept saying that people kept jumping
forward saying "I was an inspiration for Holly Golightly!" I guess
everyone was.
What kind of research went into the new book?
One thing about this book that I was trying to address was that it
feels like our present culture, politically and socially, is as
if we had not gone through the ’60s or even the ’70s and ’80s to
some degree. The social activism that I grew up with in my early
teens, I wonder where has that gone? In this book I tried to enlist
some of that, certain figures who were cultural icons who could be
today. I remember Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman and people like that
who said we’re not going to just let you take our youth and throw
them in Vietnam, we’re not going to let Watergate go away. I feel
like all of those things that were really outrageous, those social
indignities, are a trifle compared to what we have now with Bush and
Iraq and Halliburton and the money we’re getting ripped off for, the
conservative appointees to the court that strip us of our rights. I
just wonder where is the outrage? According to the polls, America is
pretty evenly divided against things like abortion. Where’s that quiet
group, that fifty percent? Where is the indignation? I was trying to
draw on some of that.
I did some basic research to enlist some figures for that aspect. The
idea of the book was rounding up the counterculture figures of
the day, kind of isolating them and letting America move on into
a conservative agenda with Reagan taking over from Nixon and the
Vietnam War continuing on. Woodward and Bernstein being arrested so
they were unable to do their expose on Watergate, and so on. That
was a key point of research: who and where.
What was the last book you read or what are you reading now? What
was your favorite or least favorite book? Take it how you want.
I went to Russia this summer with my friend Margarita Shalina,
the small press buyer at St. Mark’s Bookstore. After this wonderful
immersion in Russian culture we sat down and drew up a list of ten
books that we’re going to read this year that represent Russian
literature. I’m kind of in that right now. Some are very academic
like the Brothers Karamazov, and some are really out there.
But the problem with being a writer is that I sometimes equate it with
being a porn actor who has to come home at the end of the day and make
love to his wife. After screwing around all day, it’s very difficult
to keep it going at night. Writing the new book has almost destroyed
the pleasure of reading for me. And then your eyes start to go…
Would you find yourself in Rescue City with Woodward and Bernstein?
I’d like to think so. You become very conscious of who would have
been sent to the gulag, who would have been a threat to the state.
This was much more benign, but the idea of internal exile, would I
really have the courage to speak out against a regime, knowing they
could come after me? I would like to say that I would, but I don’t
know. It’s one of those things you have to decide at the time. In the
’30s when Stalin was coming to power, you could see the writers who
were sent to the gulag or executed, and there were those who tended
to say that they weren’t going to write anymore and spend a quiet
life with the wife and kids. You really can’t divide the heroes from
the cowards, because I really can’t blame anybody for not choosing
death. We’re not all martyrs. It’s a tough choice and it’s easier to
push someone else into the pot and say, "Be a hero!"
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