Fleeing Amy

>> Manhattan Loverboy follows The Fuck-Up

by JULIET WATERS

Midway through Manhattan Loverboy, narrator and anti-hero Joey Aeiou finds himself in court. Amy Rapapport, the woman he's infatuated with, is trying to steal his apartment and love has lost out to litigation.

"Reading Arthur Nersesian's self-published classic, The Fuck-Up, I quickly heard the court crier cry, 'AEIOU vs. RAPAPPORT.' His twisted pronunciation of my name sounded like, 'Hey you!' and every twit in the place simultaneously pointed at himself and asked quietly, 'Me?'"

As far as existential Everyman allegories go, this one is a house of mirrors. Joey is a fuck-up. He's been an ueber-loser all his life: Joey is "every twit in the place" who quietly points at himself and asks "Me?" And if that weren't enough, Joey is also Arthur Nersesian, author of Manhattan Loverboy.

To refer, in a second novel, to one's first novel as a "classic," might seem arrogant. But over the last decade The Fuck-Up has become, if not a classic, then an underground cult favourite. First published in 1991, The Fuck-Up was re-published in 1997 by Akashic Books, a small press started by Johnny Temple, bass player of Girls Against Boys, with the advance he received from Geffen. Nersesian's proto-slacker, '80s Lower East Side retrospective was Akashic's first title. Within a year, the book had been picked up by MTV Books, which paradoxically both rewarded and ended Akashic's indie integrity.

To the author and publisher's credit, however, nothing about Manhattan Loverboy panders to the mainstream. There's little character development, the plot seems made up as it goes along, surreal events occur at whiplash speed, and Nersesian provides little detail to ground his story. But read it in the context of alternative literature of the '80s and '90s, of Fantagraphics comics, Nuyorican café monologues and everything anti-Bret Easton Ellis, and it works just fine.

Manhattan Loverboy has the fast-paced tempo of anecdote and the bullet-speed wit of sophisticated stand-up comedy. The only thing that nails it to the page is the dark, allegorical framework. Part Kafka's The Trial, part Frank L. Baum's The Wizard of Oz and part Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, this is the picaresque nightmare adventure of every loser.

Joey is an ethnically ambiguous orphan adopted by an abusively indifferent Japanese couple, the Ngms. To escape his loveless life, he develops an obsession with history which as an adult will land him a graduate fellowship at Columbia. For a brief period, Joey's life seems to magically turn around. He inherits a nice apartment from a distant uncle. He changes his name from Ngm to Aeiou (a rejection of cold consonants) and studies productively until his last term when, without explanation, his B. Whitlock Memorial Fellowship is taken away.

A confrontation with his benefactor, Andrew Whitlock, leads to a hate-love relationship. An angry Whitlock uses his influence to have all of Joey's academic records destroyed; then a perversely remorseful Whitlock decides to mould Joey into an executive assistant and when that fails, a stand-up comic, and when that fails, a legal proofreader.

Enter supreme yuppie, Amy. Uninterested in him, but intrigued by his apartment, Amy drugs Joey who signs a sublet agreement that gives her the right to begin renovations that will make Joey's half of the apartment smaller every day. After Joey loses in court, Amy inexplicably falls in love with him. Before he knows it, Joey has woken up in a hospital. Plastic surgery has turned him into a bionic yuppie, who Amy has renamed Bane.

To reveal more would be to enter an endlessly tangled web of mistaken identity. After a bit of a slow start, the last half of the novel redeems itself with the hilariously surreal momentum of a runaway subway. Manhattan Loverboy is an easy, fast, fun read by an author who's had lot more success than his protagonists.

Manhattan Loverboy by Arthur Nersesian, Akashic Books, pb, 203 pp, $19.95