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.
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