Very Recent History

May 13, 2013
A cofounder of the current events Web site the Awl and a former editor at Gawker offers up his first full-length piece, an offbeat hybrid of nonfiction and fiction, in which he tracks a small group of recent college grads as they navigate life in New York City in 2009. The loosely connected band of office drones and freelancers deals with quotidian demands, professional woes, money issues, and the intricacies of sex and dating, with the recession and the city’s own evolution looming in the background. The soap opera storyline is frequently interrupted by digressive commentary on various aspects of the socio-political, historical, and economic factors surrounding the group, presented in a manner somewhere between grade school primer and remedial lecture. Sicha explains familiar elements of today’s society—from insurance to cigarette taxes to public transportation—for an unknown future audience, and though his tale is refreshingly bare-bones at points, he often misses opportunities for satire. The result is a snapshot of a year in the life of a generation coming of age in a big city during tough times, but it’s neither cutting nor profound, as aimless and unfocused as its characters. Agent: P.J. Mark, McCormick & Williams Literary Agency.

June 15, 2013
Sex. Bills. Politics. Sex. Friendship. Real Estate. Recession. Sex. Shower, rinse, repeat. Former Gawker, Radar and New York Observer editor Sicha, who now co-owns The Awl website, creates a novelistic tale that the subtitle claims as reportage. It appears to be an odd mixture of fact and fiction. Much of the text satirizes desiccated sociology books, offering archly funny examinations of New York City's class and economic structures, its absurdly inflated real estate market, the lucrative world of its various vices and other banal facts of life. Unfortunately, the apparently fictional narrative that's interlaced with these journalistic observations is wearyingly trite and unfocused. Its primary protagonist is John, an office drone at a company suffering through multiple rounds of firings, resignations and layoffs. He goes to parties with his friends, gets high and watches TV. He frets over not making enough money to live comfortably in New York City. He has sex, again and again and again, with boyfriends, hookups, party crashers and club rats, described not only without passion, but with an almost clinical detachment. "Sometimes work was just what you clocked into while you were falling in love," Sicha writes. "Sometimes sex was just something you did while you weren't at work. Drugs were something you did sometimes when you couldn't deal with one of those things, or with yourself." Sicha seems to be trying to document generational angst as a new product, something that's been done with every generation since Fitzgerald transcribed the Jazz Age. A certain rhythm to the author's prose harkens back to the glory days of coffeehouse spoken-word performances; the atmosphere of ruthlessness takes its cues from the Ellis/McInerney school of hipster-urban bards. Either way, it already feels like an artifact. An experiment in genre fusion too clever for its own good.

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