The Swing Voter of Staten Island

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.

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.