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Books: Chinese Takeout

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  • Books: Chinese Takeout

    Independent on Sunday (London)
    February 27, 2005, Sunday

    BOOKS: PAPERBACKS

    by LAURENCE PHELAN

    [parts omitted]

    Chinese Takeout
    By Arthur Nersesian
    MARION BOYARS £9.99

    Set among the bohemian art crowd of New York's lower east side in the
    run-up to the 2000 presidential election, Chinese Takeout is a baggy
    but agreeable novel about the life of a struggling painter, with an
    obvious nod to Bukowski and echoes of Orpheus and Eurydice. Our self-
    obsessed narrator is Orloff Trenchant, an Irish-Armenian New Yorker
    who is in his mid-30s, just old enough to remember when loft space
    was affordable. He lives in his dilapidated van for most of the year,
    and supplements the income he makes from his paintings by selling
    secondhand books in the street. The story finally gets going when he
    falls for a heroin-addicted poet and attempts to rescue her from her
    drugs and prostitution hell.

    Orr had a successful solo show early in his career, but his saleability
    has declined and his youthful idealism dissipated. Though there's a
    bit of room to satirise art-world pretensions, Nersesian generally
    takes an ultra-realist's approach to depicting his milieu, and
    Chinese Takeout contains enough detail about the mundane problems
    Orr has to deal with to sustain his hand-to-mouth existence to belie
    the romantic myth of the starving artist. And while he may describe
    Orr's struggle to make a living in mock-heroic terms, he makes it
    clear that if we don't all maintain a few hopes, dreams and ideals,
    our cities can become cruel places.

    --Boundary_(ID_q+b6avV71JCzMLODIUGJ9w)--
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