The first thing to like about Charles Finch’s What Just Happened: Notes on a Long Year is its cover: a drone’s eye view of a lawn party with individuals, couples, and pods of family/friends socially distanced from one another and outlined by thin, white circles.
Finch is best when he describes the ways in which he coped with the pandemic, especially the early months: listening to Fleetwood Mac and Norah Jones, hearing from a friend that he can only listen to Phil Collins and hypothesizing that “all of us are so tender that nobody can handle songs with real emotional content.” His meditation on his grandmother, the artist Anne Truitt, is worth the price of the book alone.
Because this is a memoir about our first pandemic year and because, as Finch writes, “An idiot is in charge of everything,” this book also includes a lot about Donald Trump and his acolytes. Some of it is funny but a lot of this reads like condensed Twitter takes, screeds, and memes. These portions of the book aren’t as strong as the more personal stuff (such as a description of a chronic, life-threatening and presumably rare health condition that Finch lives with — and never names — and his irrational, crazy anger when friends ask him about it in connection with COVID health anxieties).
There is also a lot in here about the stories that sparked what is now known (cliche style) as our “long overdue national reckoning on race”: the trial of the police who shot Breonna Taylor to death, the vigilante murder of Ahmaud Arbery and, of course, George Floyd. Finch uses these stories to go into history lessons about Jim Crow. (NOTE: This is a crass summary and I do not think that is what Finch was really doing, it’s just how it came across to me.)
Very funny moment in this book is when Finch connects his early panic at the nationwide lack of pasta (his favorite food) with an aside Virginia Woolf made in her diaries, post World War 1.
I was surprised that I enjoyed this book so much because it is about a time and place that we are still in and probably won’t understand for another 100 years or so. I’m surprised that I picked it up, but glad that I did.
