Characterized in the blurb as the antithesis of the hedonistic exploits of the young rich of Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis‘ fiction, Arthur Nersesian’s The Fuck-Up explores life at the other end of the scale, the destitute, the equally lost and the seemingly hopeless with the same amoral tone. A brief word about the cover design, you can probably imagine how the back cover looks from the front, and so when the reader is reading it the title forms a sort of caption which invites comparison. I can’t decide if it is appealingly minimalist design or self-consciously humiliating.
In The Fuck-Up, the unnamed narrator navigates the underworld of 1980s New York, getting by on lies and just enough luck. Having been dumped by both his girlfriend and his near-mistress, and being fired from his job at a movie theatre for asking for and receiving a raise which caused an upset among the other employees, the narrator moves in with a slightly older intellectual friend, Helmsley, and finds another low paying job in a gay porn theatre. Overhearing a conversation on a train, he goes for the job opportunity and lies to his neo-hippie businessman boss Miguel about his sexuality in order to secure his position. As he wanders the streets and contemplates his life, he accidentally finds himself the victim of a number of brutally violent incidents which propel him into further complicated arrangements, including an affair with an unstable older woman, taking up a sublet of a famous film director’s apartment, and shady business arrangements with Miguel, each destroying his life in their own way.
By the end of the second week, I stopped getting up before noon, and by the middle of the third week I stopped shaving altogether. I’d lie around in bed watching daytime TV, which is the first sign of nervous breakdown in an enlightened culture. First, I watched the noon news and talk shows, then the game shows, onto the late-afternoon talk shows, and finally I was glued to the soaps. After that TV-mangled period, I stopped watching and just slept a lot.
The narrator is far from stupid or clueless, but he manages to continually implicate himself in awful situations until, releasing himself from hospital after a vicious beating, Helmsley’s suicide, jobless after the scam is revealed, and homeless after the film director discovers he has been sleeping with his girlfriend, he finds himself made anonymous by complete destitution. Unlike most novels that let their characters sink to this level of physical desperation, of constant hunger and no glimmer of hope, there is never the sense that everything will be made okay by the last pages, which allows the physical and psychological abasement to be strongly felt. While things do eventually begin to look up for our nameless hero, it comes without any moralizing and from the most unlikely source, broadening our understanding of two of the characters.
Drifting up Broadway, past the youth industry, complete with all the latest fashion outposts, I was a ghost. I tried to look into eyes, but if anyone cast a fearful glance at me it was only so that they’d be sure they were avoiding me. I was no longer a member of the human club. But I had to get back in. I kept reassuring myself that if I thought hard enough I could find a solution. But I was working under a ruptured brain. Thoughts braced against the incomprehensible, straining to pick up a weight just an ounce too heavy for my thought muscles.
Engaging and darkly funny, like Chuck Palahniuk‘s fiction of hyper self-aware characters without the explicit grotesqueries, The Fuck-Up isn’t afraid to delve into the lives and aspects of society we too often shy away from. The Fuck-Up takes hipster slackerdom and pushes it to its most extreme, and it is not pretty.