Once upon a time, on a small rock orbiting a yellow sun, a human being named Choire Sicha decided to write Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City, a book about a large metropolis named New York City, where millions of other human beings lived in tiny little boxes and struggled viciously to secure jobs, money, attractive mates and restaurant reservations. Sicha thought it would be interesting if he wrote the book in the disconnected tone of a scientist from a future era, or even another planet. As a result, the text is filled with sweeping passages like this:

“Almost everything in the City was capital. The offices were to make money; the buildings were to make money; inside the buildings and the offices, people were employed to make things that made money.”

Alongside ones with a more myopic focus:

“Someone made a nine-inch-long metal stick, with little serrations all facing one way, and with a handle. And people were to use that to carve off tiny flaky bits of cheese. It had patent number 5100506, and the patent covered several surprising techniques, techniques that you might not expect for something as simple as grating cheese.”

The book focuses on a single year, 2009, in which the immense contraption of the world’s financial system threatened to break down. Amidst the resulting economic chaos, Sicha’s characters — predominantly gay men — drink and chatter and go home together, refuse to pay their bills, and worry (or don’t worry) about their jobs. These characters aren’t meant to be everymen, nor does Sicha intend for their experiences to give some broader insight into the human condition. Instead, he does his best to craft an intensely detailed portrait of a very specific milieu.

And therein lies the rub. For those who lived in New York City during that period, particularly those in the financial and publishing industries, much of what Sicha describes will be instantly familiar — but for everyone else, especially those with little idea of the city’s peculiar personality, the events described could seem totally alien. Sicha’s research-paper prose only emphasizes that feeling. There’s a lot of sex, but no passion; there’s a surplus of human drama, but no soul; there are pages and pages of dialogue, but none of it (and perhaps this is by design) really illuminates the characters’ interior lives. Events grind along, the dramatis personae muddle through and eventually the book murmurs to an anticlimactic close.

At some moments, that narrative tack — lengthy descriptions of everyday things like “money” or “vacation time,” interspersed with a bunch of vacuous New Yorkers sending drunken texts to one another — trembles on the edge of grim parody, which wouldn’t be unexpected from an author who used to edit Gawker and co-founded The Awl. If parody was his ultimate point, however, it’s disguised by a lack of rhetorical winking or Onion-style hyperbole.

No, it seems as if Sicha is serious in his portrayal. But in narrowing his focus, and keeping his narrative eye at a scientific distance, he foregoes the emotional layer that might have added quite a bit to his narrative — and opened some broader truth behind all his exhaustive detailing.

Nick Kolakowski is an editor at Slashdot. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, The Evergreen Review, Satellite Magazine, Carrier Pigeon and Washington City Paper. His first book, a work of comedic nonfiction titledHow to Become an Intellectual,was published by Adams Media in 2012.

 

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