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Notes on a Long Year
With unwavering humanity and light-footed humor, this intimate account of the interminable year of 2020 offers commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic, protests for racial justice, the U.S. presidential election, and more, all with a miraculous dose of groundedness in head-spinning times.
In March 2020, at the request of the Los Angeles Times, Charles Finch became a reluctant diarist: As California sheltered in place, he began to write daily notes about the odd ambient changes in his own life and in the lives around him. The result is What Just Happened.
In a warm, candid, welcoming voice, and in the tradition of Woolf and Orwell, Finch brings us into his own world: taking long evening walks near his home in L.A., listening to music, and keeping virtual connections with friends across the country as they each experience the crisis. And drawing on his remarkable acuity as a cultural critic, he chronicles one endless year with delightful commentary on current events, and the things that distract him from current events: Murakami's novels, reality television, the Beatles.
What Just Happened is a work of empathy and insight, at once of-the-moment and timeless—a gift from one of our culture's most original thinkers.
"When it became clear in March 2020 that the coronavirus was more than an annoying temporary disruption, some writers took to keeping COVID diaries. We're fortunate that one as gifted and insightful as Los Angeles-based novelist and critic Charles Finch chose to preserve his recollections in the eloquent, fierce What Just Happened: Notes on a Long Year ... Finch is a keen political observer whose takedowns of the Trump administration's almost willfully incompetent leadership are both savage and, at times, savagely funny." —BookPage (starred review)
"[A] perceptive chronicle of [Finch's] experience of the Covid-19 pandemic ... Readers will feel an intimate familiarity with the bewilderment that imbues his early observations, as he laments not being able to make certain foods because of scarcity issues ... Even at its darkest, this serves as a moving testament to the resilience of humanity." —Publishers Weekly
"A spirited testimony to hard times ... related with appealing candor ... The narrative is freshest when the author hews closest to his own life: the childhood illness that left him immunocompromised; the consolations of smoking weed, listening to music, and especially his tender remembrance of his grandmother, the minimalist artist Anne Truitt. His radiant portrait of Truitt shines as a transcendent ending to his chronicle of a dark year." —Kirkus Reviews
"Charles Finch has one of my favorite brains on the planet, and if time travel were possible, this is the book I'd hand myself in March of 2020. Not only as a crystal ball, but as a path through the inferno. What Just Happened is a reckoning, a processing, a release—an extraordinary record of extraordinary times." —Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers
"This book is so funny and so true. Charles Finch unpacks a year of plague, fear, shameless venality, and dizzying stupidity with an irrepressible wit and surgically precise cultural observations. I didn't know how badly I needed exactly this. Maybe you do too?" —Joe Hill, author of Heart-Shaped Box
This information about What Just Happened was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
Charles Finch is a novelist and literary critic, author of the beloved Charles Lenox mysteries, following one of the earliest private detectives in Victorian London. The books have appeared multiple times on the USA Today bestseller list. He has written numerous essays, articles, and reviews for The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Slate, New York, and The Guardian, and was honored with the 2017 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. He subsequently served on the NBCC's board, and has also been a board member of the arts colony Ragdale and was one of three judges for the 2021 Pen-Faulkner Prize. He lives in Los Angeles with his family.
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