Customer Reviews

All the Sad Young Literary Men

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I wanted to like this book. I really did. It sounded like just the kind of book I had been looking for. I awaited it's arrival in the mail with eager anticipation. But it's just not a good book. It's not good at all. It is really and truly one of the worst books I have ever read. And I've read some bad ones.

ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN is a novel about decadence that doesn't seem to know it is a novel about decadence. Ostensibly, it is about three different young Ivy League graduates livining in and around New York, but all three feature the same narrative voice, minimal character development, and barely differentiated story lines. The main literary conceit of the novel is a sort of historical name dropping, ala "But one thing he had learned from the Bolsheviks: history helps those who help themselves." These historical references seem to be thrown in at random; they are never explained, examined, or elaborated upon, and are essentially meaningless. It's sort of like reading movie reviews in The Village Voice, except with historical references pasted in mindlessly instead of pop and alt culture ones. Yeah, being in your 20s is like the Russian revolution, or like the Israelis and Palestinians... nevermind why, nevermind any kind of thought or rational examination of these complicated historical events, nevermind any explanation of the alluded to but never demonstrated "idea"... Mindless stuff.

How bad can it be? Try this sentence opening a paragraph about a main character's reaction to 9/11 [remember these characters live in and around New York City!]: "On the day the World Trade Center was destroyed, Sam watched a lot of television."

There is one good section of the book, pp. 62-75, about a character named Morris Binkel. Read that at the bookstore if you're curious, it's pretty good. The rest of the book is like pulling teeth.

Pseudo-intellectuals would like this book, though, because it is pseudo-intelligent, pseudo-well written, pseudo-deep, and pseudo-literary. It's crap. I've never been more disappointed with a book in my life.

With books like this getting published, we should well and truly pity the sad young literary men in our society, because the publishing industry has really gone to the dogs. Chinese Cresteds.

I graded on a curve. Gesson is obviously a bright, adept writer. Nobody knows this better than he does. Or, should I say, his thinly disguised, POV-adled protagonists, who are so thinly disguised, they might as well be naked. I bought this book because of the favorable cover blurbs from two contemporary literary gods, Franzen and Karr, and I want to say to Franzen, you've got a correction coming, and to Karr, Gessen made a liar out of you, join the club. And to anyone, in the future do not invoke the sacred name of F.Scott Fitzgerald for a meandering, plotless, emotionally stakeless novel, no matter how much potential the novelist has.

The reviews so far give fairly accurate descriptions of the book: it's basically a collection of short stories of the New Yorker Jewish intellectual slacker variety blah blah blah. And it is indeed a fairly entertaining read. But Gessen, it seems, is not quite novelist material. The stories, each of them built on some fairly clever conceit, the comparison of Israel-Palestine or the Russian Revolution to mid-20s relationships, for example, fail to lend depth to any of the characters. Gessen seems to be about what most inexperienced writers are about: themselves. We have a fairly quick-paced, cursory overview of a few forgettable characters, probably loosely based on the author's post-. The subject matter, the territory itself, is worthwhile, but Gessen never quite slows down to really write, to capture a moment. I was not surprised to learn the author mostly writes magazine articles and reviews for prominent magazines. There are few sublime moments, there is little in the way of vivid imagery, no signature voice. One is left with the feeling that pretty much anyone could have written this, given some time. And yet Mr. Gessen seems to know enough of the right people to get some preferential treatment for his debut novel, as it is prominently featured in all the right bookstores and heavily (and positively) reviewed. Not that it's a ghastly read. It certainly isn't. But its prominence is not quite commensurate with the actual content.

Presented in alternating chapters, Keith Gessen's debut novel is actually three tangentially related novellas relating the stories of three sad, young, literary men.

A doctoral student in Russian history, the recently divorced Mark turns to online dating and Internet porn. He is distress over his Google rating: the number of hits on his blog are declining.

Sam's ambition is to write the Great Zionist Ep;ic, even though he isn't a practicing Jew, can't read Hebrew, and his project is conceived before he visits Israel and the occupied territories.

Keth, a Russian immigrant, is a liberal politico-cultural critic who apparently stands in as Gessen's alter ego. His comments on America's ill-advised military adventurism is cynical and acerbic.

Blundering their way through life, these three protagonists inflict insult and injury--psychic pain--on themselves and on the women with whom they have love-hate relationships.

Believing themselves to be responsible adults, the three anti-heroes behave as spoiled juveniles who need to grow up, slouching their way toward a lonely middle age.

I can understand why Keith Gessen's peculiar novel, "All the Sad Young Literary Men," has drawn such divergent reviews, ranging from Jonathan Yardley naming it as one of the best novels of 2008 to various Amazon readers dismissing it as a disjointed series of whiny elitist sketches peppered with esoteric information about Russian history. This is a different sort of novel than many readers will have encountered previously, demanding a degree of patience before the three narrative threads and 1917 Revolution references coalesce into a meaningful whole.

Organized in three parts, each consisting of three chapters told from the point of view of Sam, Mark or Keith, it takes a while for Gessen's voice to establish itself and for any semblance of plot or theme to emerge. That each of the protagonists is a Russian immigrant who's struggling to distill a career from a liberal arts, Ivy education, while failing miserably to forge a satisfying romantic relationship, makes it especially challenging to keep their personas and story lines from blurring into one another. Indeed you get the strong impression not only that first person narrator, Keith, is the author's alter ego, but that Sam and Mark also present little more than splintered parts of Gessen himself.

These criticisms aside, there are some undeniably funny and moving passages in this most literary offering. Mark's digs on life in Syracuse, NY (which I can appreciate having grown up there) are spot on. And his musings about our young literary men's ill-preparedness for important life decisions will resonate with all of us who have made critical decisions without appreciating their import until later: "The trouble is that when you're young you don't know enough; you are constantly being lied to, in a hundred ways, so your ideas of what the world is like are jumbled; when you imagine the life you want for yourself, you imagine things that don't exist. If I could have gone back and explained to my younger self what the real options were, what the real consequences of certain decisions were going to be, my younger self would have known what to choose."

So my advice is to give Gessen the benefit of the doubt and read this one all the way through, applying the proper amount of attention and trust. By part three of the novel, when Gessen shows how the protagonists are connected through their love interests and connects the dots illustrating the parallels between the Russian Revolution and the recent return to power of the Democratic party in the United States, you can really appreciate what this unique novel is all about.

'All the Sad Young Literary Men' is not a bad read. Author Keith Gessen is often humorous in a dry way rather than absurdly over-the-top, which I appreciate, and I also think he probably gets at some of the strain that young male college graduates might experience, especially those with literary dreams. If the author had been content with that, then the reader would only be left to question whether some of Mr. Gesson's stylistic choices suited the narrative or not. Unfortunately, there is a far bigger flaw to my mind, intentional or no, that really impinges on the novel's value, and that is that it reads as if the insights into this small demographic of age, gender, and education level apply to everyone.

The story follows three men, only tangentially connected - who are in various ways dreaming of a literary life. Really though, they are all in a state of becoming the adult they are to be, and wrestling with putting away childish things. Like any advance from one stage of life to another, this is a painful, stressful process, and all three of the fellows deal with it with the 'two steps forward, one step back' methodology. Sometimes even two steps back.

One of the charges leveled against the book is that readers have difficulty in differentiating between the three character - and I have to fully agree. Even in the midst of reading, I couldn't keep them straight, but I don't know if it mattered too much - I indulged in the biographical fallacy of assuming they were all parts of Mr. Gessen (or his close associates), and didn't get too wrapped up in the details. This didn't seem to affect my enjoyment of the novel very much - it wasn't until the end, with the neat tidying up that I began to have trouble.

Intentional or not, the ending of 'All the Sad Young Literary Men' seems determined to make universal points, and I suspect that even Mr. Gessen, as he reaches the hoary old age of forty and beyond may cringe at how much he knew when he was thirty. That these young men discover valuable life lessons that allow them to move beyond the adolescent stage of play-acting adults is pertinent as far as it goes, and entertainingly wrought by the author. Confined to those conditions, 'All the Sad Young Literary Men' is a bit more fun than some other contemporary literary fiction I've read recently, but when it steps outside of those boundaries, it lost relevance for me.

When I opened this book, I was astounded by the first chapter and its lucidity. They are in New York, a young couple fresh out of college, and they are trying to survive on nothing at all. They scrimp and scrounge. Much hay is made over snicker-bar lunches and splitting $8 deli sandwiches (this is New York after all).

I wish I had stopped there.

The rest of it was a lot like college. You follow a Jewish guy around as he struggles mightily in his head with writing the great Zionist epic. Then you follow him to grad school in Syracuse. Whee.

It doesn't take a great leap of imagination to realize that all of the men depicted are actually aspects of the author. Jon Franzen pulled a similar trick in the Corrections.

However...well, you lost me with grad school in Syracuse. Grad school in real life is where desperate liberal arts majors go to be buried, and unfortunately this book really can't make good of it either.

Started out strong...I didn't even finish the book.

I really looked forward to reading this book, and I can't say I didn't enjoy it. Neither can I say my time wouldn't have been better spent elsewhere. There are some great wry observations and some sharp moments, but ultimately the book felt insubtantial. Maybe it's not fair to ask "so what?" of a book, though it's not completely unfair, particularly if you're open to a range of answers. This book didn't quite put one together for me. That said, I will probably give this writer's next book a try. Talent is in evidence.

Viking seemed to have hopes of creating a new Doug Eggers here, but no go. The writing is clean and sharp, but not insightful or witty. This novel reads like an A- MFA thesis, and deserved publication, not the hype. You feel some for the three male characters, on the surface, but most are as shallow as a coke-snorting Bret Easton Ellis character. We don't care for about them and their petty lives; they have it better than most, even if they are poor; none of them have any true drama or trauma in their lives, nothing extraordinary happens. There's no plot, either; what this is is a book of three loosely interrelated novellas, not an ensemble piece. But: nothing happens in this "novel." Maybe the writer has done this intentionally, to show the European-like angst of American nothingness among college-educated East Coast men with various ties to Mother Russia. I finished the book because the prose was crisp and lean, so it wasn't a chore, and I kept hoping for a rabbit to be pulled out of the hat, the way Eggers did with his first book -- something to slap ya across the face. But no.

Sorry but this isn't a book; or, rather, it shouldn't be. It's more of an adolescent's dream, a composite of juvenile reactionaryism (ok, not a word) that didn't deserve to see the light of day. I don't find any need to discuss the plot, characters, themes, style, form, content or value. Simply, it has very little.

Purchase if you really love hearing annoying stories/screeds from your whiniest, overeducated/underutilized friends.