Chinese Takeout: A Novel [Paperback]

Arthur Nersesian (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 29, 2003

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.

Orloff Trenchant is a painter who sells books on West 4th Street in Manhattan and is obsessed with mastering his craft. Desperate for cash, Or agrees to take a commission no one else will touch: he has three weeks to carve a headstone for a recently deceased restaurateur -- a Chinese takeout box. As Or attempts to make his deadline, he navigates among a toxic mix of fellow artists, struggling gallery owners, bloodsucking art dealers, his politically active friends, and a haunting addict poet whose life is more out of control than Or's own.

Nersesian's prose is sparkling and hypnotic in this brutal and comic story that will make you wonder if life and art are two different things.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Nersesian (The Fuck-Up; Manhattan Loverboy) weaves a heartfelt, tragicomic bohemian romance with echoes of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orloff Trenchant is the quintessential starving artist, leading a hand-to-mouth existence as he struggles to make his mark on the cutthroat New York gallery scene. Dumped by his artist girlfriend for a rich collector, living out of his beat-up van or borrowed lofts and selling used books on the sidewalk to make ends meet, "Or" is beginning to question his art-for-art's-sake ethos when he meets his muse in the person of Rita, a beautiful poetess, prostitute and heroin addict even more desperate than he is. Nersesian sends up the pretentiousness and excesses of the art world, but without the jeering tone the subject usually provokes in satirists. He writes evocatively of the processes and products of the artistic life, and he believes the issues raised by it-realism versus abstraction; money and security versus creativity and passion; the struggle to wrest deathless art from the transience of life, even from a Chinese takeout box (Or is commissioned to sculpt a tombstone in that shape for a deceased restaurateur)-are worth pondering. Indeed, the novel itself is a sprawling, obsessively detailed portrait of the Lower East Side demimonde during the 2000 election, as Or's frenetic life bounces him between used book stores, gallery openings, drug dens and literary dives where poets spout Naderite polemics. 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.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Orloff Trenchant is a 30-something painter whose brush with death is only one of the forces driving him to create his seemingly endless sketches of a swimmer struggling in the East River. While the politically charged dispute over the 2000 election rages around him, he must sculpt an abandoned chunk of alabaster into a unique headstone to free himself from the financial morass he is in. Concurrently, he becomes increasingly entangled with the cynical, witty young heroin addict he has come to depend on for human feelings in a sea of urban alienation and decay. 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. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; 1 edition (July 29, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060548827
• ISBN-13: 978-0060548827
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,236,925 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Arthur Nersesian is the author of eight novels, including the best-selling The Fuck-Up (more than 100,000 copies sold), dogrun (MTV/Simon & Schuster), Manhattan Loverboy (Akashic), Suicide Casanova (Akashic), Chinese Takeout (HarperCollins), Unlubricated

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Worth every penny!, August 26, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Chinese Takeout: A Novel (Paperback)

Once again, Nersesian proves himself to be the master of urban novel. This book is another fast, fun read! I highly recommend it along with another fun East Village novel about an unlucky writer addicted to the personals: THE LOSERS' CLUB by Richard Perez. Also recommended: THE F**K-UP also by Arthur Nersesian. All 3 books make up what should be called the 'East Village Trinity.' Short, lively, intense books! Most of all -- FUN!

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A More Mature Bohemian Novel, March 17, 2005

By 

David Wiesenberg (from Newark, NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Chinese Takeout: A Novel (Paperback)

CHINESE TAKEOUT by Arthur Nersesian is yet another bohemian story by the master of the downtown New York City novel. If you've read his other books you would know what I mean. The pacing of CHINESE TAKEOUT is a bit slower and more polished, more mature and disciplined than his previous works, particularly The F**K-UP and DOGRUN, yet entirely enjoyable. Yes, it's gritty, a bit grim (as bohemian stories usually are) but I also found it quite funny at times and much more realistic and detailed, less cartoonish than his other, more manically paced works. This is a good, character-driven novel -- melancholy, yet endearing somehow. I guess I can't help but root for the underdog. And if you ever tried to make it as an artist -- either as a painter or as a writer, you will really appreciate this novel. Trying to be an artist in America is a subversive act! And, at every turn, you will be PUNISHED for that choice! That's really what his novel is saying. To quote the Clash: "You have the right to free speech ... as long as you're not dumb enough to actually try it!"

Also recommended: DOGRUN by Nersesian (if you haven't read it), THE LOSERS CLUB: Complete Restored Edition by Richard Perez -- which really knocked me out!

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Channelling Bukowski, December 14, 2004

By 

Dr Lawrence Hauser (NYC, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Chinese Takeout: A Novel (Paperback)

I am presently working my way through the fiction of Arthur Nersesian but chose to review Chinese Takeout having found it to be the most fully realized version of this author's conception of how unrecognized artists struggle to survive their art in downtown New York City. Nersesian, whose prose frequently reminds me of the late Charles Bukowski's best writing (Women, Post Office), devotes each novel to a different art form. The Unlubricated, for example, takes up the craft of stage production and acting while Dogrun's protagonist is an aspiring writer. Chinese Takeout is about a painter-sculptor and is marvelously evocative of the bohemian studio scene within which the book's 'hero' circulates while trying to scrape out a subsistence living. Nersesian himself is a very painterly writer whose febrile imagination provides an endlessly entertaining and poignant storyline. This aspect of his talent insistently propels one through the pages of Chinese Takeout but it is the undertow of the writing, the uncompromising exploration of love in all its most irrational manifestations, that distinguishes this writer and separates him out from the crowd. I rarely read a book which galvanizes me to seek out the entire literary output of an author but I was hardly finished with The Unlubricated before I secured copies of Nersesian's five other novels. They all investigate similar terrain but from distinct vantage points. They are each, in their own way, a joyous excursion into a sequestered world of youthful abandon.