Tao of Pauly

Book Review: Chinese Takeout a novel by Arthur Nersesian

"I was sick of being an artist, but like a head cold I'd get over it... I tired giving up painting. I resolved to... make a salary. Build a life with a working wife and obligatory children with whom, as though forever trapped in an elevator, I'd grow old... I wasn't after a job or family. I was searching for a different kind of pain, one with less fiery creativity and more monotonous security... I was claustrophobically bored of the whole poverty shtick... relentless hours of exhausting work that were almost never compensated. But then I remembered that there was really nothing else out there." - Arthur Nersesian, Chinese Takeout

This is on the back of his book: "From the author of the cult classic The Fuck-Up comes a vicious new tale of art, drugs, love, and death on the Lower East Side."

I finished reading Nersesian's latest novel Chinese Takeout. And without a doubt, it's his best work since his first novel The Fuck-Up. Nersesian is a writer from NYC and the author of Manhattan Loverboy, Dogrun, and Suicide Casanova. I skimmed parts of Suicide Casanova on my lunch breaks last Winter. Aside from that half-assed effort, I read all of his other novels at least twice. Why? For a while I was considering adapting one or more of his novels into screenplay format. Last Spring I began the tedious process of adapting Dogrun. I quickly gave up after I wrote 1/3 of the screenplay. I decided to start up my blog-zine Truckin' and focus on my own writing instead, and the screenplay project has been collecting dust ever since.

Arthur Nersesian is my favorite NYC writer and one contemporary author that I admire. His novels are exclusively set in NYC as the old adage goes: Write what you know. His characters are densely layered individuals... each unique, but with some sort of universal characteristic that you can easily indentify with.

The main character in Chinese Takeout is Orloff Trenchant (his nickname is Or, which adds to his consistent indecision through the novel). Or is a painter but makes his living selling used books near NYU in the Village. Scrapped for cash he agrees on a job that nobody wants: he has three weeks to carve a headstone for a local deceased restaurant owner... in the shape of a Chinese takeout box. While he begins his monster assignment he struggles with the rest of his own miserable life. June, his girlfriend and fellow artist leaves him for another man. His friends are an odd collection of somewhat famous artists, a bevy of "has-beens", a politically charged activist, and a couple of shady art dealers. And of course, Or falls in love with the wrong girl, Rita, an addicted poet whose life is more fucked up than his. Or is man who struggles for his art and atempts to discover which is a better road: commercial success or true passion?

The Fuck-Up is Nersesian's best work. However, I felt that I identified with the characters on a more sincere level in Chinese Takeout. Where as The Fuck-Up took place in the 1980s... Chinese Takeout was set in NYC before 9.11... just around the time of the 2000 election. (I assume he wrote the manuscript around that time). It was a warm memory of what life was like in NYC pre-9.11.

Here are some excerpts that I enjoyed:

"I needed to do. I had to leave my mark before twenty-seven. That seemed a make-or-break age; all bona-fide geniuses proved themselves by twenty-seven. I worked my ass off... I sold some work and got three decent reviews. It was then that I first realized that I was not as great as I thought I'd be. But that was all right; I could still be a good journeyman painter..."

"It wasn't enough having done the works. Who had seen them? Who had sought them out? Where was the fame and fortune? Just as goals had been modestly attained, new and more complex aims had replaced them. Although I didn't write myself off as a complete failure, all the illusion and romance was gone... I had already disappointed my own expectations and was genuinely worried about dying on the streets."

"'My young friend, there comes a point in life when you just got to 'fess up to what you are and what you aren't...'"

"I pitched pennies at a large rat scurrying along the tracks, until the train finally arrived - it was the last pleasure a cent could afford."

"He regarded nine-to-five living as a resignation of all real dreams."

"To last as an artist one had to feast on neglect and guzzle down rejection, because those were the only two things you were guaranteed."

"When a painter looks at his art... he sees a reference to a time in his life."

"There is nothing wrong with people having money. What bothered me were those who believe that capricious upsurges of the market made them more valuable as human beings. This was the core of my disdain for dealers, collectors, and the rich in general."

If you have the chance, read Chinese Takeout and spread the word about Arthur Nersesian.