Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City

by Choire Sicha

What will the future make of us?

In one of the greatest cities in the world, the richest man in town is the Mayor. Billionaires shed apartments like last season's fashion trends, even as the country's economy turns inside out and workers are expelled from the City's glass towers. The young and careless go on as they always have, getting laid and getting laid off, falling in and falling out of love, and trying to navigate the strange world they traffic in: the Internet, complex financial markets, credit cards, pop stars, microplane cheese graters, and sex apps.

A true-life fable of money, sex, and politics, Very Recent History follows a man named John and his circle of friends, lovers, and enemies. It is a book that pieces together our every day, as if it were already forgotten.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, LGBT, Queer, Gay, Contemporary, New York

240 pages, Hardcover

First published February 12, 2013

Reviews

[Roxane · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has a really interesting concept but it strains at book length. The writing is, at times, beautifully incisive, but it also feels a bit condescending because the core audience for this book already knows what Sicha is talking about here and probably shares his palpable anger. It all becomes too repetitive, too earnest. The characters are largely indistinct and, though it pains me to say this, at times, I felt like I was reading the man's version of Girls, because this seems to take place in that same NYC, if you know what I mean. I wanted the book to rise about its concept but ultimately, for me, it did not.

[Stephanie Sun · Rating 3 out of 5]

Once (2013 A.D.) there was a reader, who was also a writer. (This was towards the end of the brief period when most countries with developed literatures considered writers and readers to be entirely separate classes of people because the high cost of operating printing presses and distributing and storing new longform narrative texts for sale limited mass distribution of new longform narrative texts to a finite number each year, leading to a small population of published writers writing for a much larger population of readers.) The reader wished to read a book intellectually stimulating enough to be not boring and yet less intellectually stimulating than the two books by Nobel Prize-winning authors that she had checked out of the library a few weeks prior, one of which she had just finished and the other which she was not yet ready to start reading because her mind was over-stimulated by the first. (A library was a building, usually subsidized by local and federal governments, containing collections of books, periodicals and other media that people, after registering with the library's database and presenting ID and proof of residence, could bring home with them for limited periods of time for free.)(The Nobel Prizes were a set of awards given each year to exceptional individuals around the world by the designated administrators (and their successors) of the property holdings of the inventor of dynamite, beginning five years after his death in 1896.)

The reader chose Very Recent History to read between the Nobel-winner books, and it proved to be the perfect choice in terms of providing the right amount of intellecutal stimulation for the reader. The reader had formerly resided in the city that the book was written about during the period of time that the book was written about, so it was enjoyable to her to learn about what life in the city during that time period was like for another group of people, especially since much of the book recounts the customs and dynamics of all-male gatherings which, as a female, she would never be able to witness in person.

The book was written in an unusual voice for the subject matter, and this voice was one of the reader's favorite aspects of the book. Unfortunately, the voice was not applied consistently, and the author frequently lapsed into other more typical and less experimental voices, such as the one that he developed over many years writing for well-trafficked websites, even lapsing at some points into second-rate satire for two or three sentences suddenly before switching voices again.

The reader liked, and learned from, the book's frank discussion of financial difficulties absent of heated political rhetoric. People ordinarily were more open about their financial, professional, and personal successes than failures, even amongst friends, so one could get an inaccurate picture of how unique or ordinary one's own successes or failures were.

The reader thought that the narrative thread about John's transition from a promiscuous lifestyle to a committed relationship with a charmingly flaky young man, although not a novel story, grounded the book in a satisfying arc of tension that she liked books to be grounded in. This tension had been discovered 2,348 years earlier by a writer and philosopher named Aristotle. It was considered to be a desired quality of narrative texts by many people, but it was still uncertain at the time why this was so.

[Sarah Beth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received an Advance Reader Copy from HarperCollins.

Very Recent History is a non-fiction account that follows the lives and adventures of John, a recent college graduate living in New York City in the economic downturn of 2008, and his large group of male friends. I found the book jacket summary of this book very misleading. It does not adequately describe the unusual writing style, nor does it reveal that John and all of the men mentioned are gay. There's a lot of gay sex and reference to gay relationships in this book, which is fine, but was unexpected. I thought the book would be looking at a broader and more diverse segment of individuals from New York; instead the vast majority of people referenced are white, gay males, making it difficult for me to distinguish between individuals.

The writing style of this book is truly unique, as it is written like an anthropological study of New York Life, as if from a distant observer to be read by individuals from a foreign culture. The city is not named, nor is the mayor, although its clear what the author is referring to. In addition, Sicha goes out of his way to define terms and concepts that are generally accepted as known by most readers; "This was called credit, and in modern times, what these men invented was called a charge card. The card was a signifier that one held money; the holder of the car would pay the issuer of the card at the end of the month; the issuer of the card would pay the stores at which the person had received goods or services" (74).

While this unique style of writing and distance from the subject matter forces the reader to look at New York culture in a new light, however what Sicha illuminates is a sad tale. John and his companions are all miserable. They work in cubicles at unsatisfying and underpaying jobs, are constantly broke, are deeply in debt thanks to college loans, and the culture of casual sex and infidelity is prevalent. Simcha is strictly reporting their movements and actions though, so no conclusions or allusions to their fates following the end of this book are hinted at. It is up to the reader to analyze John and his peers, and, in turn, take a more objective look at the choices made in our modern world.

I was really disappointed in this book. I found its contents depressing, and its writing style ultimately very grating. Although I think there is some merit in writing in an anthropological style, I did not find this an enjoyable or particularly valuable read.

[Patrick Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

This both a snapshot of New York City circa 2009 -- the height of the financial crisis, with layoffs looming like hurricanes over every desk -- and the story of a guy named John. It is also the debut of a tremendously original voice in fiction. Sicha has cultivated his own idiosyncratic style through years of online writing at Gawker and The Awl (of which he's co-founder), and the confidence of his style shows through here. Some may find the almost bewildering dialog at bar and party scenes (of which there are many) off-putting but I though it perfectly captured the dizzy feeling of being a little drunk in a crowd of people, many of whom you think are hot. It reminded me of how party scenes are often handled in a certain kind movie -- a roaming camera following a person or group of people through various little snippets of conversation (My favorite conversation in the book is one character insulting another character's tennis grip.).

This is also -- maybe? -- a Marxist novel. Are those out of fashion now? I can't keep track. Anyway, the way in it which it relentlessly skewers Mayor Bloomberg and other uber-wealthy characters (there's a sideways mention of Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka, by way of her marriage to Jared Kushner...oh my god, maybe this book is "entirely factual"?!) coupled with its obsessive chronicling of John's spiraling health care and education-related debts makes this book a compelling critique of post-capitalism.

Lastly, I have to commend this book for finally stating what I've felt and said for so long: The entire Dick Whitman/Don Draper storyline of Mad Men is an embarrassingly obvious rip-off of the Principal Skinner/Armen Tamzarian plotline from the Simpsons. Finally, somebody else said it!

[guiltlessreader · Rating 2 out of 5]

I suffered through this. I found it tedious; it felt like required reading. There were glimpses of what I think would be considered innovative or novel, but the payoff never really came for me. I probably just didn't get it.
Check out the FULL REVIEW on my blog Guiltless Reading

[Meave · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is so so so good. It's like magical and mundane and beautiful and sad and nuts. I love it so much. His language is so careless and so precise, and the decisions he makes about what elements of modern life to explain and which to let go are so interesting to see and wonder about, and the people and the dialog feel so accurate. It's so funny and weird and great. Read it.

[Hank Stuever · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m a tiny, tiny bit acquainted with Choire Sicha (in the mutual-friends/Twitter sense, though we’ve never met) and certainly an admirer of his work for many years, so there’s that. “Very Recent History” is an interesting experiment in nonfiction, testing the idea that really big subjects (the economy; the wealth gap; the Great Recession) can be interpreted and even magnified in the stories of everyday lives of citizens (in this case, a bunch of self-absorbed gay men in their 20s scraping by in New York). I completely believe in this approach, and I believe in the reporting here.

The way this book is written is an overt expression of the noble hope of all nonfiction book writers, especially people working on big-picture journalism or cultural studies: That some alien archaeologist in the future will pull the pages from the rubble of our world and, once the text is translated, will at last See How We Lived Before It All Ended.

Sicha strongly maintains his style and tone throughout, which is that of an omniscient explainer/historian, who frequently stops to give the reader a basic definition of objects, in a very clinical manner: “John went out and bought a pair of tough denim trousers called jeans. Often riveted at stress points, jeans had originally been worn strictly for labor. They had since grown popular for daily wear … ” Or: “A guy named Matt walked into the bar. He was a comedian, which meant that Matt performed in front of other people, for money, as often as it was possible, in order to make them laugh.”

That’s either conceptually brilliant or unbearably affected – hard to decide, given that it works about as often as it doesn’t. Fairly soon you encounter nouns that you wonder why the narrator/author decided NOT to describe: cigarette, condom, restaurant. (After all, he explains what gold and silver are – an alien won’t know essential elements and minerals?)

I’m not entirely convinced that the parallel tracks in “Very Recent History” converge. The poverty these (employed, well-educated, gadabout) men are experiencing is a very rarefied sort of suffering, which will be lost on a lot of readers who are gamely trying to follow the book’s thread of analysis. Sicha observes them through a year of living and partying and treating one another poorly, while he also describes New York (“the City”) and the economy and how things work. It’s quite possible that I have missed a very nuanced, almost “American Psycho”-like satirical message encoded in the mundane and repetitive (and sad) surface details of their lives. I found it difficult to remain interested in these guys, and my eye kept glancing ahead for more of the coldly removed descriptions about the City and the economy.

So, as you can see, I can’t decide what to think about what I’ve just read. For me, it’s a beautiful miss, but I’m curious what others think.

I give the book three stars, but I talked myself into adding an extra star for the discipline seen in the book's structure and voice.

[Peter Knox · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fan of Choire's writing (Awl reader since Day One) and having lived this same 2009 year in NYC, I was interested in seeing things from his third-party perspective. He does not disappoint in class rage, matters of (little) money, the types of conversation one has amongst peers, and the rather existential dread that the City can create amongst the drifters looking for a perfect job/apartment/partner, knowing that to have even two of those would be an upgrade.

Choire's at his best when explaining (to future readers) how and why we do the things we do today, the strangeness of US/NYC politics and laws, and the various ways technology works (and rules) in our lives at present. In those passages, the satire is exactly what you want it to be (and what you're used to in reading The Awl). But the constant partner swapping politics in his gay peer circles derail much of the plot and didn't much add to my experience, although I imagine its rather true to life (just not necessarily my own).

In your late twenties, live/lived in NYC, use today's technology, gay male? If you're one or more, you'll find something here. It's an updated All The Sad Young Literary Men for a different set and worthwhile. I hope Choire writes more.

Wonderful length interview: http://www.salon.com/2013/08/05/blogg...

[A · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though the billing of this book as nonfiction reportage seems implausible and unnecessary (did Dawn Powell's skewering of the downtown demimonde sting any less because it was fictional? Did Candace Bushnell's?), I think it's actually true. Investigative journalism with its transcripts and archival research is the only thing that could explain how fucking to a T Choire Sicha nailed what my life was like in 2009. I mean are you fucking kidding me? Down to the littlest detail, this is how I spent all of that lost weekend of a year (and, OK, I'll admit, how I spent 2010 and 2011, too).

Which is why it pains me to say that that's the part of the book I enjoyed the least. The exhaustive chronicling of the circle jerk of friends' couplings and uncouplings grew quickly tedious for me. Sure, part of that was fueled by self loathing of my own inane immaturity during that period, but most of it was distaste for the bland monotony of reading about it. Instead I wanted more of the amazingly insightful socioeconomic insight that the seemingly Martian narrator delivers throughout. Sicha's strongest online writing has always been less the "gay stuff" and more his cultural criticism, and that's true here. Three stars because I (for once!) wanted the dull roar of the gayness to be muted so the rest of what the author had to say could be heard.

[Elaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is unreal. I've written a full review of this book 3 times, and 3 times, it hasn't posted. Well, this time I'll limit myself to saying that I'm not an objective reader, because Choire is an old and dear friend, and I'm very happy for him that this book has been published.

I'll also say that the central device of viewing 21st century metropolitan capitalism and mores through the dry lens of a distant future works beautifully. The distance permits us to see just how much is contingent in things and systems that seem natural. And in many parts of this book, Choire's wonderful ear for idiom and detail shines through in his narrative voice. (I liked his anonymous cameo as well!).

The weak part comes for me in the central cohort of young aimless men that he follows. I found them indistinguishable, which I think was part of the point. But it certainly didn't make them very interesting! I hope in his next book Choire takes on a broader swathe of New York. He certainly has the writerly chops to do so.

[David Dinaburg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this book was one thing, and when it turned out to be something else entirely I wasn’t particularly pleased; it occasionally slide back into my a priori expectations so I withheld judgment, picking at each page with my nose held daintily aloft, like a secret Star Trek fan at a weekend convention they are “Just attending because my nerdy friend wants to.” By the end of Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City, though, I was swept up in the experience; I had willingly set my extended-metaphorical phaser to “fun.”

The hook was dissociated textualization of where I lived and when I lived it—New York City circa 2009. It was the weird—cool-weird, but still weird—dissociation that compelled me to request a copy from the library after skimming the dust jacket blurb at a bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn:

Each person lived and moved and worked in his own this particular slice, like a glass plate in a high, compressed stack. The happier, richer people, it was imagined, were up above in ever-thinner, ever-shinier glass plates. People with all the freedom, or a great job, or a loving boyfriend, or at least an empty and gorgeous apartment.

And below: thick slabs of the poorer, the lonelier, and the hopelessly left behind. Those were people who’d gambled maybe with actual money and lost, or who had never had anything to begin with. There were so many more of them, an all-day warning to the foolishly ambitious or the reasonably aspirational.

I assumed, based on nothing, that the entire novel would be like this: a Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for contemporary life in New York City. And I guess it kind of is—if I want to be tautological—when it is:

And also this was the attraction of the City: the proximity of the plates of classes grinding together, the corner office visible from the bullpen. When someone was young in the City, he couldn’t know what he would be, and that was an alluring mystery. Some days he might think he was bound for riches too. Some hours he might think he was slipping into a permanent disaster.

And everything else that was free, the people you spoke with and the people you slept with, those were strategies of filling a need you could not address in a system of capital. Which is to say, the good news was that no matter how hard the City tried, or the owners in the City tried, it could not make absolutely everything about profit and need.

People’s lives would always seep out toward freedom, trashy or hilarious or messy or sexy or whatever—toward things that lie beyond profit and loss and order and economy.

There are clear citations to Mayor Bloomberg and Speaker Quinn, and you’d easily recognize them if you were around in 2009. Locations I’ve been to and policy changes I’ve lived through make appearances; surprisingly, there was no comment on the 2009 subway fare hikes which broke the 'two-dollars-flat-seems-reasonable' barrier and brought the fare into the 'I-hope-you-like-carrying-change' two and a quarter range (it now stands at a chufty $2.75). Stepping back to view the city from such distance is the same sort of feeling that lingers after an out-of-town trip, when the crowds and the noise and the dirt all feel so onerous; by the third day back it is difficult to remember what it is like anywhere else.

The thrust of the book is Derrida and his couch—if you skipped Lit Theory 101, the synopsis is as such: the physical couch in your home isn’t really a couch but one representation of the true, technically formless, ideal couch; the couch-as-concept. That’s what much of this novel is; New York City as concept, the Derridian "true" New York City. It’s an interesting hook for lit wonks that want something different from their novels, and a fun exercise in rhetorically defending our quirks to hypothetical future generations. Which leads me into the curveball: underneath the trope of a deconstructed New York there lurks an actual cast of characters that are not idealized representational forms but actual quirky people. It was a slow shift from Derrida lecture to peopled plot. Very Recent History is not only a very recent history: the focus isn’t just the city and the culture but on a network of friends and acquaintances that live within the ephemeral framework described with such disconnected detail. The contrast between the pall that formalism masques everything with—cameo portraits of reality, specifics of the city coated by matte through formalistic breakdowns—and the colloquial, messy lives of the people within is wonderful juxtaposition.

Near the beginning of the book, the air of deconstruction barely stirs—the characters are as circumscribed by conceptualism as the reader:

John thought that people came to the City, and only then did they realize just how very many people there were. They arrived casually, just to try it out, to see what happened, but wound up getting caught in the great impossible sea of people. With so many, how could you choose one deserving of all your attention? With so many choices, you could easily think that there was always another better one.

The further in you go, the less the City matters; the characters become the focus. They are given first names only: Chad; Diego; John; as they float by like shadows on the wall until the story snaps them into focus:

“Is everyone watching the Yankees game?” Edward asked.

This was at a party.

“Who cares. It’s so stupid,” Jason said.

“John has forced me to watch football two or three times,” Edward said.

“He forced me to watch baseball once,” Jason said. “I didn’t know what was—I mean, baseball I can understand at least. Football, it’s so incomprehensible. It just starts and stops?”

“I felt like I was retarded because he kept trying to explain it to me,” Edward said. “All those things about ‘downs’? I was okay watching them run around, but any time there was any kind of numerical—”

“No, the point system is nonsense!” Jason said.

“Oh, that’s okay,” Edward said.

“Well, like, you throw it through the ‘U’ thing and that’s like seven points? I think?” Jason said.

“No, I think that’s like one,” Edward said. “Or three?”

“Oh. I don’t even care obviously. At this point I’ve gone so far over the top,” Jason said.

“I think it’s like six if you get a touchdown, then it’s a chance if you go through the thingie and then you get an extra one,” Edward said.

“That just seems so worthless,” Jason said. “I think you should get a lot of points if you go through that ‘U’ thing, not just one. Who wants one fucking point? I don’t. I want seven.”

And while it feels real rather than deconstructed—dialogue that is contemporary and not at all idealized—it is still metaphorical; Jason and Edward do not comprehend the system as it stands—in the City or in the game—or even what the points represent. So of course one point is scorned and seven is the desired, because in the City, more is de facto better. Points. Dollars. Square Feet. It matters not. Because the City will always push you towards higher consumption.

I didn’t expect there to be people, particularly not such a large dramatis personae. I certainly didn’t expect the cast to be mostly twenty year old gay men. Describing the Ur-experience of what it was to live in New York City in 2009—linking the idealization and formalistic deconstruction upon which the novel depends—to a cadre of young gay men is bold; it isn’t the standard pitch of an interesting concept wrapped around a safe Point of View character, typically the “middle-aged white man as he thinks thoughts about family and death and capitalism.” As much as I was a part of New York City in 2009, my life was wholly different from John or Chad—the wonder of a good book is that the reader bridges the similarities and the differences at the same time—it creates empathy:

And so people who had jobs felt like they’d lived by their wits, and John felt this way most times. Or they felt they’d escaped by luck, and Edward felt this way most times—except when he felt he hadn’t escaped. And there were people who felt they’d escaped but only barely, and they knew it was maybe only for a bit. You could actually literally always be more poor than you were, as surprising as that might seem when you owed tens of thousands of dollars or made only a few hundred dollars or, in the City, a few thousand dollars a month.

But then, the whole point of being in this City, it turned out, was staying nimble enough to take advantage of whatever strange things the City might choose to offer to you.

Very Recent History wasn’t at all what I thought it was when I picked it up; at first, that irked me, but once I shed my expectation of Derrida’s New York: The Novel and let this book take me where it wanted to go, it was worth the journey. The point of reading fiction, as it is with life (within the City or away from it), is to stay nimble enough to take advantage of whatever strange things a novel might choose to offer you.

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Today’s Non-fiction post is on “Very Recent History: An entirely factual account of a year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City” by Choire Sicha. It is 240 pages long and is published by Harper Publishing. The cover has a picture of The City looking up between the buildings to a grey sky with the title and author information in a purple rectangle in the center. There is strong language, talk about sex and sexuality but no violence in this book; 18 and up just to be safe. It is told from an odd third person close. There Be Spoilers Ahead.
From the back of the book- Choire Sicha’s brilliant, enigmatic first book is a nonfiction account that reads like a novel. A voice from the future is piecing together a record of life in a “massive” city on the eastern coast of this country and follows John, a sexually profligate reporter with a weekly newspaper, and his circle of friends as they navigate the expensive, dark world around them. It is a fable of money, sex, and politics, featuring an imperious Mayor (the richest man in town) who is campaigning for an unprecedented third term, a Blind Governor, elevated to office in the wake of a prostitution scandal, who is trying to overcome scandals of his own; and Beyoncé.
Told in Choire Sicha’s distinctive style, Very Recent History is a work of detailed reportage and an Internet-era historical pastiche that seamlessly weaves together first-person interviews and current events, presenting a surreal and sublime portrait of New York circa 2009; an island of isolation, ambition, sublimation, and attraction.
Review- This is an interesting way to tell a biography. I do not know if Sicha is in the book. He chances everyone’s names or gives them no names to protect them and himself. The story is about the life of John as he tries to live in The City when so much of America’s financial center where coming apart at the same time. Sicha gives the reader an odd shaped window into a life. The book starts at the beginning of the year and moves through the year in bits and pieces. By that I mean there is no chapter just about January but it about the winter then it moves slowly into spring and so on. It is at first not easy to red because there are so many characters that move in John’s life. The book will start a new scene with John then move to his best friend Chad and his boyfriend Diego and their relationship and then move back to John. The whole book is like that but I enjoyed it. This book is odd but it is very readable and I really enjoyed the oddness of the book. If you are looking for something a little different then try this one.
I give this book a Five out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I was given this book from HarperCollins in exchange for an honest review.

[Chris Talbot · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book describes a 20-something gay journalist in NYC and his adventures (or lack thereof).

The main themes the author communicated to me are the following:

The city is expensive, and there are a lot of rich people there who have more than you, and them having more than you reminds you of what you don't have.

The gay bar scene of the younger than 30 set. He nails it as a repetitive ritual of intoxication and make out sessions with people you probably shouldn't be making out with, and who you probably dislike.

However, the main theme that I got out of the book is that the author, and his friends, have no sense of self. The characters are barely fleshed out, to the point that I had a hard time remembering who was who because they were all so vacant and indistinguishable. I may be giving the author too much credit by assuming that this was intentional, to emphasize that his characters are larval; flat and personality free works in progress. This made all the characters seem like rudderless ships, ready to crash into battery park at any moment due to an unfortunate but still expected stray wind. I'm still not sure if this was a clever way to communicate the immaturity of the characters, or was just sloppy storytelling.

I can not recommend this book. While I feel it had a good amount of potential, and the topics being explored are certainly timely and of import, the book did not engage me as much as I would have liked. However, it did remind me that I don't miss my 20s at all.

[Rebecca Saxon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the originality in the way this story is told: a detached, seemingly-future narrator describing life in 2009 NYC during the financial meltdown, by focusing on a small group of gay men. It basically switches between explaining city living in 2009 to someone who's never experienced it, to detailing John's (a debt-ridden despite having a job, gay man) life and his circle of friends & lovers.

When it's at it's best, the book provides a sharp critique of current society and its many issues. At its weakest, it feels bogged down with the very shallow-feeling lives of John et al. Of course, I think that's the point: that we are unable to see the bigger, more troubling picture of our world because we're focused on the day-to-day mundane details of our lives.

That being said, I gave it 3 stars because I'd sometimes feel that Sicha forgot that "the reader doesn't know anything about this world" premise, and would gloss over explanations. It's like he'd forget to really have fun critiquing our current world. (Of course, if Sicha did that for everything, the book would never progress.) It was also hard to care for John and his friends, even though they remind me of many folks I've known (and possibly even me at that age).

I'd be interested to see how I feel about this book 20 years from now. Will it remind of things I've forgotten? Will I find it annoying? Or will I like it even more once I'm further from the time described?

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is very interesting. I love how Sicha writes as if the reader has no conception of New York (or American or even human) life. As if we're reading this thousands of years in the future and need to know every detail. And that's where the charm is, in how he describes things like the Internet and social conventions and the seasons. I had a few favorite qoutes:

"The backs of knees were shining everywhere. There was maybe no good evolutionary or biological reason for everyone to want to touch someone's skin on that first warm day of spring, but there it was...The nights grew more tempting. The mornings were easy, until the day you woke up, your throat swollen, the apartment too hot and gross, before the cold spell of the open window. The trees would stop and just wait. The looping squiggly bands of air would get pushed and bunched around the world , and then finally one day a warm dry blast settled on every avenue and abandoned lot. The City transformed." (pg. 62-63)

"People's lives would always seep out toward freedom, trashy or hilarious or messy or sexy or whatever - toward things that lie beyond profit and loss and order and economy." (pg.80)

And while there is a story of sorts, it's mainly the observations of this book that are most interesting. It seems the story only serves as a conduit for these observations.

[Eugene Beronilla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Above all, this is a great, easy read, definitely a nod to New Yorkers. However, perhaps only the politically-minded-slash-hiptistic Citydwellers will get the milieu referenced through winks and elbow nudges peppered in the book. The lack of universal appeal is almost unapologetic, which honestly may be the main intrigue for this novel. Otherwise the structure is the kind of cavalier attitude found among the characters.

An early review from Miller from the Observer sums it best that “sex, money, employment, friendship, love: ‘Almost everything in the City was capital.’” To add, the narrative also discusses how wealth and currency are so historically fluid that it’s almost arbitrary. Seashells got trumped by minerals, which got trumped by paper, which got trumped by credit. In a failed business economy, our lost hero John reappraises his social portfolio, which may explain the plethora of undeveloped secondary, tertiary, and even quaternary characters who oddly get prime page time in the short novel. Unfortunately people like those in the City become currency as well – sometimes we have enough, sometimes we squander, and oftentimes we want too much. Who and what are valuable one day will depreciate the next in these strange days of fluctuating human exchange rates.

[Richard Kramer · Rating 5 out of 5]

VERY RECENT EVENTS, a wonderful novel with a wonderful title by a wonderfully named author (Choire Sicha), follows the lives of a handful of young men in New York in 2009. They get jobs, they lose jobs, the jobs they find still leave them with strings of days with no money at all. They kiss each other in bars, they live with their parents for a while; they watch the bills for their student loans pile up in front of them. And another thousand people just got off of the train ... Sicha limns, to snatch a verb from the ludicrous Kakutani, a joyless and scary town, but his young men find joy there anyway, and sex, and the occasional glimmer of hope. This is a book of sentimental educations, told with a studied lack of sentiment that can’t fully hide the depth of feeling underneath. It's small and large, rich and thin; Sicha takes a risk with voice that sometimes works beautifully and other times grows coy. But the book comes home. It made me sit down a few times to mimic it, to try to echo its unique tone. I don't know if I succeeded. But I know Mr. Sicha did.

[Whit · Rating 4 out of 5]

One thing I have learned about myself is that I ravenously consume any media relating to the 2008 Recession. I graduated from undergrad in 2009, which was a sorry time to emerge from any kind of cocoon. I often describe graduating and going to grad school during the Great Recession thusly: Some very smart people whose Plan A was to get jobs couldn't get jobs, so they chose Plan B, which was to go to grad school. I was one of the legions of people for whom Plan A was grad school. But just because it was other people's Plan B didn't mean they were less smart or competent, and in some cases they were extraordinarily brilliant and more academically muscular than the people who chose Plan A so they could have a quiet tenured life bouncing between sabbatical and teaching for the next fifty years. As I exist in a dystopian academic landscape that seems to be a cascading series of implosions building towards something apocalyptic and irreversible, my fascination with the Great Recession probably does not seem outside the realm of reason.

Choire Sicha is someone who has flitted in and out of my peripheral vision since my early college days. He was at one time the editor of Gawker (well, two times, as his bio on the back of Very Recent History pointedly clarifies), but as big of a job as that used to be, it only hints at Sicha's greater importance. I think his mark on Gawker, and thus the writing of internet journalism as we know it, with the morally-grounded and at times quite self-satisfied sharp snark of someone who is having much more interesting conversations with much more interesting people than you in his spare time and has honed his wit to a razor's edge, is very much indebted to his style. I was a fan of The Awl, his project after leaving Gawker, which finally died without much comment by the wider internet in 2018. It was actually in the aftermath of that death, when I was reading The Awl and lamenting that I did not do more to support its writers (an impossible burden to bear in a click-based economy, but we are in a world that outsources responsibility from poor system design and choice to individuals and then chides them for not doing more in a system that is designed to profit off of the critical mass an individual can't summon, but I digress), that I looked to see what else Choire Sicha had done and found this book.

I have seen others speak to the length of Very Recent History as being to its detriment, and I must concur: a 250 to 1000-word blog post allows for some spellbinding gymnastics that are harder to pull off over the course of 255 pages. Rhetorical flourishes - the appositive ending in an exclamation point, for example, which I love for its folksy "can you believe it?" sincerity layered on top of a deep cynicism that indeed does believe it, and believes it so much that it knows that speaking to it is saying the obvious - and paragraph-long asides explaining in plain language institutions and processes that we all take for granted but, when spelled-out, actually make little or no sense (several explainers on the third term of Bloomberg, corporate downsizing, and money are a few of the standouts), give the book the "anthropologist from the future" vibe that people refer to in their reviews. Those parts are the most revealing and, deep-down, below the unconvincing lowbrow didacticism, hostile. Far from being an empty populist indictment along the lines of "if it doesn't make sense to John Q. Public, it can't be good," Sicha's prickly prose is about pointing out that the rules have logical fallacies and that those logical fallacies have become part and parcel of the American experience.

The human story in Very Recent History is itself anthropological, but it is not told with quite the alien lecturer voice that characterizes other sections. The prose in the sections about the characters center on John and his circle of gay friends who pile up against each other when the wind carries them and who part when the wind carries them away. Perhaps in the sense that Sicha's writing feels like a twentieth-century fairy tale, with its simple language explaining ineffable feelings, the sections about John and co. do fit in the book in a larger anthropological sense, as if Sicha has researched these characters in an archive and reconstructed them as personalities from old chats and Grindr profiles. But we are to believe, from the subtitle, that Very Recent History is "an entirely factual account" to the point that the names have been changed to salvage some sort of anonymity. Sicha doesn't seek to explain these human beings (they exist, and to try would be a kind of condescending that would likely strain those relationships) but to simply present them as human, making decisions that don't make sense in part because they live in a system that doesn't make sense and has enabled them to think of themselves immediately and in short bursts into the future but no further than that.

It is a snapshot "of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City." Through the approach Sicha has chosen, its explanatory power is reduced. It may be nonfiction, but it is not seeking to explain but to at once expose and connect disparate assumptions, cultures and ideas - consequences, city culture, gay subculture, and money - to the everyday living and confusion of young gay men in New York. And because it is from one of my favorite writers I have had the opportunity to read in my 22 years on the internet, a man whose work I would jump through hoops and dig through old archives to experience, it felt enriching to me in a way I'm not sure it would to others. There are better ways to experience Sicha the first time (just go dig around on The Awl archive if you're curious), but I think Very Recent History works as a meditation, both on the inconsistencies that are baked into the foundation of our modern madness and on adapting, growing, and pushing ahead into new, and sometimes bittersweet, phases of life.

[Jose · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the strangest book I've ever read, and I thought about putting it down at least once. However in the end I think I kind of liked it. The characters do seem to be interchangeable but that is actually true amongst groups of gay friends. I think I have been friends with at least a couple of the guys in the book (and I don't live anywhere near "The City"). I thought I was going to read a book about some guys struggle during the great crash of 2009, instead I got a modern gay novel. However I do have to say that the way it's written can be sometimes tiresome, even thou it's not a bug but a feature. Gay guys everywhere do talk like that and do live like that. The only difference is that in "The City" they seem to go out more.

[Kerry Riffle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book - and did enjoy the author's conceits of non-fiction written as fiction and describing everything as if we were visitors from a far planet or the far future who had no point of reference to c. 2009 - but ultimately that conceit wasn't enough to sustain even a short tale of some struggling but shallow(ish) late 20-something NYC gays. I often had a hard time keep track of who was who as they were all mostly indistinguishable from the lead character, John. And he didn't come off as all that likable or sympathetic. (Maybe that was the point...?) ... Well, a "A" in style just can't make up for a lack of substance. Too bad.

[Diana · Rating 1 out of 5]

Literally & figuratively a thin book. Half mock anthropological text half documentation of gay NYC 2009. The book seemed to have little to no point. The characters were thin as thin can be--interchangeable "J" named men with interchangeable partners and I get that's a bit of the point but the characters had no depth or detail except to chronicle boring party conversations and errands. So happy I'm done reading this book.

[Oriana]

God I love Choire Sicha. Here is a piece he wrote about New York money and nostalgia and fame and also more money.

I want this book so super bad.

[Shawn · Rating 1 out of 5]

A poorly written soap opera.

[Jenni · Rating 3 out of 5]

The concept of this book is really fun: like science fiction, it addresses current social and political issues by distancing the reader from them to allow a more objective view to the inanity of human behavior--except that it's written about the present, not some distant future. Student loans, mayoral voting, dating, corporate layoffs, and consumerism all appear as if under some alien's curious eye, leaving them (and us, the readers!) shaking their heads. Humans--what a weird bunch!

Toward the end, though, the story focuses more and more on the lives of a group of friends and their dating habits, and becomes an exasperated recounting of their most mundane, gossipy conversations, while also preserving the way people naturally talk. This means it's a lot of "and then he was like... and he then was like... " I liked most of the story so much that I think it was still worth the read, even if I lost reading steam toward the end.

[Kim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bad Bret Easton Ellis for millennials. Two stars for the social commentary and the Bloomberg parts but the endless hookups between Chad, Jason, John, and [insert random white's guy name here] added nothing here. Sicha said in an interview I read that this wasn't a book for people in their 40s and above and he was right.

[Jessica Keltz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am the audience for this book. I moved to NYC as a 30-year-old unemployed professional trying to rebuild my career, at the end of 2009. A former coworker is even mentioned, and the author’s opinion of her is as low as my own. But I was not a fan of the conceit/writing style and would have enjoyed a more straightforward fictionalized memoir more.

[Lin Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book goes by in a snap. Many people may not like its fast-paced non linear style, however, it does have a lot of historical accuracy and a great account of how living in New York during the economic crisis effected people, and how it didn't.
I'd recommend this to anyone who is looking for a casual read, and likes feeling a little slutty. ;)

[Yuliya Dzemesh · Rating 1 out of 5]

“Very Recent History” tries to be clever, but ends up reading like a term paper written by a robot who just discovered irony. The detached tone makes real people sound like museum exhibits, and the whole thing feels more like a parody of New York pretension than an actual story. It’s dull, confusing, and self-satisfied — like overhearing a long, boring brunch conversation you can’t escape.

[Chelsea Triano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely an interesting parallel to be reading about the depression of 2009 in the midst of a global pandemic and depression in 2021. Sometimes difficult to follow character plots, but an easy read all around.

[Brandon Gaukel · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was strange to relate to something’s on 2009 and then feel alienated by others with this group of queer men.

I like the style but it seems to be a hated part of this book but enjoyed it. Statically satirical and dry.