Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City
by Choire Sicha
First Posted October 2015
This review does not really please me. Bloated and inchoate, I wish I had spent longer editing it back in 2015. I also wish I had refreshed myself on what Derrida was all about before I kind of…tried to talk about Derrida. But I highly doubt that many people actively remember more accurate details about Derrida, so it’s fine.
It’s all fine.
I did make a stronger editing pass to remove what I consider an offensive term that seems to resurfacing in casual conversation. In 2015 it felt like a strong signifier that this book was set in 2009, but it has certainly made its way back to the teenaged set: since it is not longer doing any heavy temporal lifting, out it goes.
Also, hot dang did I like those m-dashes. I tried to preserve as many as I could handle, because it was the style at the time. But yikes, I can see why AI, trained on free random blog writings, is so m-dash heavy. Part of the problem!
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; a secret Star Trek fan gently resisting a weekend convention they are, “Just attending because my nerdy friend over here 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 that grabbed me was a 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 in the brief window when one returns from out-of-town trip, a time when the crowds and the noise and the dirt all feel so onerous. But 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 but a novel with a focus outside the city and the culture, on a network of friends and acquaintances that live within the ephemeral framework described with such disconnected detail. The contrast between the pall with which formalism masques everything—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 [derogatory term] 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 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.