You’re Not Much Use to Any­one is a hyper-real­is­tic peri­od piece set in the exact present. David is the name of the book’s twen­ty-two-year-old nar­ra­tor as well as its author, and the tale he spins is too ground­ed in the Amer­i­can cor­po­rate land­scape, too emo­tion­al­ly self-defeat­ing, and too piti­ful and pet­ty to be any­thing but the truth. After grad­u­at­ing from NYU with a degree in Eco­nom­ics, David tries to live off his par­ents’ rent mon­ey in an East Vil­lage apart­ment and delay respon­si­bil­i­ty for as long as he can while he fig­ures out what plea­sures the world has to offer a young, broke adult like him, and how to obtain them.

David’s great­est pas­sion is read­ing and com­plain­ing about the pop­u­lar and pow­er­ful music review web­site Pitch­fork, and he begins writ­ing a blog to cri­tique Pitch­fork’s arti­cles, which he apt­ly titles Pitch­fork Reviews Reviews. The blog goes viral and infects David’s myr­i­ad offline rela­tion­ships: he out­grows his first girl­friend, who leaves ersatz New York City to work the land on a West Coast farm; he pur­sues, catch­es, and los­es a sec­ond girl­friend, an MFA recip­i­ent whose writ­ing chops don’t attract an audi­ence a frac­tion of the size of David’s blog’s; he quar­rels with his par­ents, who under­stand­ably have a dif­fi­cult time com­pre­hend­ing David’s intan­gi­ble, anony­mous online suc­cess and nag him to apply to law school and climb a pro­fes­sion­al lad­der. The book chron­i­cles David’s rise from an unem­ployed, love­less col­lege grad to an under­em­ployed, love­less Inter­net celebri­ty, ques­tion­ing the mean­ing of such a vir­tu­al ascen­sion as the sto­ry unfolds.

Though the book is tech­ni­cal­ly a nov­el, Pitch­fork is a real-life music review web­site and Pitch­fork Reviews Reviews is a real-life blog, and the many var­i­ous brands, prod­ucts, and celebri­ties David ref­er­ences through­out the book are from real life, too. The book, like David’s life and the lives of many young Amer­i­cans like him, is mired in ref­er­ences to copy­right­ed words: Dori­tos, Black­ber­ry, and Star­bucks come up in the first two-page chap­ter alone, lat­er joined by Sein­feld, Edi­ble Arrange­ments, Google Maps Street View, Belle & Sebas­t­ian (a favorite band of David’s; a song of theirs lends the book its title), Zip­car, Jack Daniels, Amer­i­can Appar­el, The New York Times, and Barack Oba­ma. One of the book’s great strengths is its painstak­ing­ly accu­rate, high­ly detailed descrip­tions of quo­tid­i­an thoughts and habits of twen­ty-two-year-old Amer­i­can col­lege grads.

Relat­ed content:

• Up All Night: My Life and Times in Rock Radio by Car­ol Miller
• Read­ing with Sound­tracks by Alyssa Berlin
• The Hee­bie Jee­bies at CBGB: A Secret His­to­ry of Jew­ish Punk by Steven Lee Beeber