Given how long some books sit on my shelves before I finally get to them, the fact that I am picking up this 1500 page book only a year after I bought it (and when it was published) and tackling it means something I think. It doesn’t hurt that earlier this year I read The Power Broker for the first time, Robert Caro’s 1200 page book about Robert Moses’s life and career as the (often extra legal) architect of New York. How that basically worked was that Robert Moses used a corporate shell company to help pay for the Tri-Borough-Bridge, and then ran funding for other projects through that company regardless of the legal authority to do so by one of the many unelected posts he held at various points of his career. Through legal manipulation and brazen political gaming, he was able to impose his will on the landscape of New York City and very rarely lost any battle he chose to take on. Whenever he did happen to lose, he often enacted a petty revenge soon thereafter. For example, when it took the full force of the presidency and the department of war to stop him from enclosing New York harbor with a bridge, he destroyed the Battery Park aquarium and killed most of the fish there.
So that’s our background for this novel. The novel takes place in the early 90s or late 80s. In 1970, a dirty bomb irradiated most of New York making it unliveable. The federal government relocated the vast majority of the inhabitants to an ersatz New York City in Nevada called “Rescue City” that recreated facsimilies of the city’s most famous spaces in the desert, including creating the various waterways in the desert. When the water quickly became polluted and with little connection to the outside world the population soon became trapped, and the resulting breakdown of the goverment led to warring gangs taking up control in the resultant power vacuum. Our story begins with Uli Sarkisian coming to in this world with vague memories of the world around him and some set of mission parameters repeating in his brain. We are as lost as he is as his limited ability to make sense of the world is our only narration for a while. But once all of us get a hang of things and the shape of the world settles in, we begin to understand the power structures and plot at play.
Later, Uli begins to have some kind of lucid dream about Paul Moses, the older brother of Robert Moses. From Caro’s book, what you learn about Paul Moses is that he was an electrical engineer who had a tenditious relationship with his family, especially his mother. When he was disinhereited, Paul seemed to believe his brother Robert was responsible. Left only with minor investment holdings in the summer of 1929, Paul found various kinds of work related to engineering, but losing out a coveted appointment, he believed his brother again blocked him. We also know that Robert had control over the very meager investmentsn Paul had into his older age. This lucid dream takes this shell we know and expands upon it with Paul’s early life at Princeton, being conscripted into the Mexican revolution, being married twice, having a child and growing old. How much of this is invented for the novel is not clear to the otherwise ignorant reader, and I won’t be looking it up until after this book has settled in my mind. But taking one of the most famous New Yorkers of all time, and viewing him only through the eyes of a jealous and resentful brother is inventive way to frame this alternate history.
And that only takes us through 40% of the novel (600 pages!).
Book 1 of this novel begins with Uli wandering around Rescue City as both him and the reader become acquainted with the new world, the various plots, and wandering in what feels like a haze.
Book 2 gives us the duel-story of Uli and Paul Moses sharing a kind of memory transference (one way from Paul to Uli) while Uli also is following a possible lead to escape the city.
Book 3 gives us a local election in the space between Brooklyn and Queens where a third party being nominally represented by former Andy Warhol film stars try to unwrench the grips of the two primary warring gangs.
Book 4 gives us a lot of the gaps and backstory to book 1 and 2 by retelling many of the same events through the eyes of a different character, while continually tying loose ends together.
Book 5 gives gives us ultimately the conclusion of all the different storylines, but before that, we finally get the background to Uli’s work with the FBI and the different things that led him to Rescue City.
The effect of all of these different books is a spiralling effect where gaps are slowly filled in in the narrative leading to the main story, which happens to be the relatively simply story of families once divided trying to reunite, both physically and emotionally.
So what is reading this book like? Here’s some of the various influences and parallels I thought about while I was reading this. The most obvious of course is Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. Additionally: Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Thomas Pynchon’s V, Vineland, and The Crying of Lot 49, Rick Perlstein’s books, Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants, Joan Didion and Susan Sontag nonfiction, various JG Ballard, and some William Gibson and Neal Stephenson thrown in. I don’t quite think the Philip Dick and William Burroughs comparisons quite work.
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48644818-the-five-books-of-robert-moses?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=pZUSigu6rr&rank=1)