Customer Reviews

The Swing Voter of Staten Island (Akashic Urban Surreal Series)

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I just burned through Nersesian's new novel, The Swing Voter of Staten Island. Initially, I was a little disoriented because this isn't what we're used to from him and I really enjoyed The F*ck Up and Suicide Casanova. Once I got started, I realized that the core elements of his writing are still there; humor, intelligence, quirk, NYC, a little smut and a little violence but everything is trippy and surreal. He's obviously going in a totally new direction.

Swing Voter follows a man named Uli who finds himself in a strange, jumbled, fun-house mirror of New York, which turns out to be a "Rescue City." In the novel, New York prime was hit by terrorist bombs in 1970, ten years earlier. The set up is believable when you look at it as a combination of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. Remember when disaster struck then the Federal government threw everyone into the Astrodome and Barbara Bush made announcements about what an improvement it was. It's essentially the same thing except the Astrodome is the size of a city and no one ever gets to leave.

The city is split into two gangs, The Piggers and The Crappers who fight for control but they're also legitimate political parties and because the little city is still attached to the U.S. government by a thread they get one tiny vote in the presidential election. The presidential election is so close that the one vote can make all the difference.

Swing Voter reads like Jeff Noon's The Vurt with a touch of Cormac McCarthy. Sometimes bleak, sometimes hopeful, always imaginative, Nersesian creates a world where even if you're a native New Yorker you happily become a tourist in Bizarro-New York.

I've read most of his novels, and really loved them when I used to live in NYC. I just found this one on a recent trip to Powell's Books in Portland and read it in 2 days. Its really different from his other books, but also really damn good. If you like reading about New York, Politics, and alternate realities than this will really do it for you.

At the beginning of the book, the main character Uli is in what appears to be New York City. He has lost his memory and been programmed to assassinate someone. Things go awry and he gets sidetracked from the assassination - for one thing, this isn't New York, but a replica built in the Nevada Desert - and involved in a whole different plot to influence the U. S. election. The two political parties of fake NYC, the Piggers and Crappers, correspond to the interests of Democrats and Republicans but not in the way you might think. The fifth borough, Staten Island, a sludge-ridden home to pig farms and anarchists, may be the tie-breaker. Uli has a lot of unpleasant adventures in this world and not everything is resolved.

I've never read this author before, but this sounded so weird, I had to pick it up. I was entertained by this book but couldn't decide if it really worked or not. If there's a sequel, I will have to go back and find out what happens.