WHAT JUST HAPPENED

Sharp observations of a dizzying year.

Agreeing to a request from the Los Angeles Times, critic, essayist, and mystery writer Finch began documenting his experiences during the Covid-19 lockdown beginning in March 2020, when the future seemed hardly imaginable. As a financially secure, Yale-educated White man living comfortably in LA, the author realized that he was far more fortunate than many Americans. An emergency room physician friend in New York made him deeply aware of Covid’s assault on the city that had become the epicenter of the virus. During the height of the pandemic, Finch got out of the house for long walks, connected on Zoom, and occasionally met with a few friends for a socially distanced drink. “Life is simple,” he reflects. “Don’t go anywhere and be afraid.” Although related with appealing candor, much of what Finch notes may well seem overly familiar to readers: a dearth of paper goods and hand sanitizer in the early days of quarantine; hopes of quickly containing the virus; alarming statistics from around the world; anger over the murder of George Floyd; sadness about the deaths of John Lewis and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Trump’s absurd remarks (an injection of bleach, anyone?) revealed “how things happened every day, sometimes every hour, that you would throw your body in front of a car to stop.” As death numbers mounted, Finch realized that “anyone can find a story of a person that’s almost like them dying.” 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 (Taylor Swift is a favorite, the Beatles a happy rediscovery), reading and writing—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, when everything seemed to be “trembling at the edges.”

A spirited testimony to hard times.