All the Sad Young Literary Men (Hardcover)

by Keith Gessen (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
In n+1 founding editor Gessen's first novel, three college graduates grapple with 20th-century history at the dawn of the 21st century while trying—with little success—to forge literary careers and satisfying relationships. Mark is working on his doctoral dissertation on Roman Sidorovich, the funny Menshevik, but after the failure of his marriage, he's distracted by online dating and Internet porn. Sam tries to write the Great Zionist Novel, but his visits to Israel and the occupied territories are mostly to escape a one-sided romance back in Cambridge. And Keith is a liberal writer who has a difficult time separating the personal from the political. Less a novel than a series of loosely connected vignettes, the humor supposedly derives from the arch disconnect between the great historic events these three characters contemplate and the petty failures of their literary and romantic strivings. But it is difficult to differentiate—and thus to care about—the three developmentally arrested protagonists who, very late in the novel, take baby steps toward manhood. There's plenty of irony on tap and more than a few cutting lines, but the callow cast and listless narrative limit the book's potential. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

This interesting and agreeable first novel, by a young writer who already packs a formidable resumé, is a considerably better-than-average exercise in slacker fiction, a genre of which I confess to having only limited knowledge: I've read and reviewed (very favorably) Ted Heller's hilarious novel Slab Rat (2000), and I've seen "Knocked Up." All of which doesn't exactly lop 40 years off my age. But it does leave me aware that stories about goofy young guys who just can't seem to get a handle on life -- not to mention a handle on women -- can be good entertainment for readers, as the saying goes, of all ages.

Keith Gessen himself scarcely qualifies as a slacker. Born in Russia in 1975, he came to the United States with his parents and eventually found his way to Harvard and Syracuse Universities. He now lives in Brooklyn, where he writes articles and reviews for a number of national publications. He is a founding editor of n+1, a literary magazine that has caused a modest amount of controversy in New York's sublimely inbred literary circles; its political bias is decidedly from the left, but, as Gessen said in an interview with the online New York Inquirer, "we hate the contemporary systems of buying, selling, profit, speed, etc., but we like a lot of contemporary art." Beyond that, Gessen is well on the way to a career as a translator from the Russian; his books thus far include Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl (2005) and a forthcoming edition of Scary Fairy Tales, by Ludmila Petruskevskaya.

All in all, a serious guy who wouldn't seem to be either a slacker or a candidate to write a slacker novel, but that's just what he's done in All the Sad Young Literary Men. It's a novel with three protagonists -- Keith, Sam and Mark -- who, as they turn into their 30s, are discovering that "you did not emerge from your twenties smiley-faced and full of cheer and love for all existence," and that they are "no longer very young, no longer very happy, though still unsettled, still a mess." Their stories are told separately and connect only in passing ways, yet together they form a convincing portrait of bright young men with vague literary ambitions who can't quite work up the energy to pull the trigger on their futures.

Each of them obviously is drawn to some degree on Gessen himself -- scarcely a surprise given that this is a first novel -- in that they're urban guys in their 20s during most of the novel, they're Jewish, and they're smart but, at this point in their lives, out of focus. Only the four sections about Keith are narrated in the first person. When we meet him it is the 1990s, and he is a student at Harvard. He comes from the Maryland suburb of Clarksville, a leafy appendage to Columbia, and he is reading about Abraham Lincoln in a scattershot way while worrying about various girls and complaining, in a most slackerly way, "I just don't understand what people want from me. I just don't really understand what I'm doing." One summer he gets a job "at the student employment agency at Johns Hopkins, which sent students out on odd jobs -- mostly, as it turned out, moving furniture." Mainly, he's just spinning his wheels