All the Sad Young Literary Men (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "It was just at the point when things were finally cracking up for me that I ran into Lauren and her father on Madison Avenue..." (more)
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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.)
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From The Washington Post

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:

"It was a nice time, though the work was hard and the money was bad, and I had no idea, really no idea, what would become of me in the years ahead. My college career had been, so far, disappointing. . . . I kept waiting for someone to tell me what they thought I should do, should be, what particular fate I, in particular, was fated for. It was the last summer that I hung out with my high school friends, and it was the last time I'd ever feel that strange, expectant, hopeful, pleading way."

For all that, he's smart enough to know that this won't go on forever, that sooner or later the trigger will in fact be pulled, "that if I applied myself, I'd be fine, more than fine, and if I didn't, I would probably fall through the cracks." Much the same can be said of the other two. Mark, who to my taste is the most interesting of the three, had gone to Russia while he was in college, had met a girl named Sasha there, and three years later married her and brought her to New York. By 1998 he was making "his meager living . . . by translating industrial manuals into English" and, on the side, studying Soviet history and thinking about graduate school. Like Gessen, he winds up at Syracuse University, and then his marriage falls apart: "Mark was like those stunned post-Soviet Russians during the draconian free market reforms, watching their ten-thousand-ruble lifetime savings, still active in their memories, turn overnight into fifty dollars. The Devaluation, it was called. And it hurt."

So Mark is cast back into the world of women, one that all good slackers find infinitely beguiling and mysterious. Things don't go very well in that regard in Syracuse, but then he moves to Brooklyn and suddenly everything seems to fall into place. For years he has been "preoccupied with the problem of sex" -- "He considered it in the positivist tradition of how to find it, of course, but also, and more significant, in the interpretivist or postmodernist tradition of how to think about it, how to ponder it historically, how to discourse about and critique it" -- and suddenly it's all around him, "in the form of young women who thought that Mark was just fine, that Mark was just dreamy. They loved that he didn't have any money; they adored that he didn't know how to go about getting it. He was so cute! thought the women. Where did you come from? thought Mark. The answer was that the colleges produced them. Then bought them plane tickets, gave them Mark's address. 'The workers have no country,' wrote Karl Marx -- but Mark Grossman did have a country, as it turned out, and that country was New York. . . . At the age of thirty, Mark Grossman had finally solved the problem of sex."

The problem of sex, maybe, but not the problem of women. Just ask Sam. His dream, "he realized after much thought and much agony and some introspection, was [to] write the great Zionist novel," even though he knows nothing about the subject, but his main preoccupations are Arielle, his ex-girlfriend, and Talia, "a long-term endeavor" who packs plenty of challenges: "Talia was a strategic, a territorial, problem: where would Sam be when she was at Spot A; what was Talia's current liquidity, and did he need to withdraw cash; where was her silver hair clip? Talia had weaknesses, aspirations, well-mapped idiosyncrasies. He would, perhaps, spend the rest of his life with her; that is, if he played his cards correctly, and she also played correctly; there were complications, corrections, concessions."

Sam is forever comparing his own life to Israel's history, just as Mark is forever comparing his life to the Russian revolutionaries. When one of his girlfriends suddenly announces that "she had broken up with her boyfriend, the very boyfriend Mark had so zealously tried to chase away," Mark is taken aback: "In his way he'd developed an attachment to the boyfriend, as the revolutionaries might be said to have developed an attachment to the tsar." Then this girlfriend, Celeste, gets competition in the fetching form of Gwyn, and the temptation to draw parallels intensifies:

"If meeting Celeste post-boyfriend was like arriving in Russia in March 1917, hopeful March after the tsar's abdication, the appointment of the provisional government, the short-lived democratic process, then they were well into anarchic June or even forbidding July. Was Gwyn his Kerensky? His Kornilov? Ekh. Ultimately these historical parallels were of limited use in figuring out your personal life."

They're of much use to Gessen, though, as he extracts a full measure of fun from the proclivity of these smart young guys to intellectualize everything to death. As the passages quoted above make plain, he has a deft satiric touch and a nice feel for irony. He gets a little soft in the closing chapter, which mixes Keith's evolving personal life with Washington's evolving political life in 2006 and 2007, but ending novels is almost never easy, and it's a perennial problem for first novelists. It will be interesting to see whether, the second time around, Gessen pulls himself out of self and into the larger world, or whether he succumbs to the navel-gazing that too many literary American novelists find so tempting. There can be no doubt, though, that he has plenty of talent to work with.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (April 10, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670018554
• ISBN-13: 978-0670018550
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #324,531 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars I really wanted to like this book...., July 3, 2008

By	C. Lambright (NYC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars All the Sad, Young Literary Readers, August 21, 2008

By	Margaret M. Gregerson "addicted to books" (Newport Beach, CA.) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

18 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not a loser, but not exactly a winner. Gessen can do better., April 27, 2008

By	Roy E. Perry "amateur philosopher" (Nolensville, Tennessee) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.