Last year, Keith Gessen's All the Sad Young Literary Men provoked an unusually divergent response from critics and readers -- pans from the Independent, the A.V. Club, and the Village Voice; reserved admiration from Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Review of Books; a condescending thumbs-up from Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post; a nearly opinion-less summary from Andrew O'Hagan in the New York Times; and overweening praise in a number of places from Jonathan Franzen. For the most part, the blogosphere seemed to shake its head -- another semiautobiographical debut novel about white, navel-gazing, Harvard-educated, urban twentysomethings? -- with a disgust that varied perhaps according to each commentator's feelings about n+1, the brash literary journal that Gessen founded with three friends in 2004.
This spring, All the Sad Young Literary Men appeared in paperback, and I think it's just almost good enough to recommend to those who missed it in hardcover. It is as myopic, as narcissistic, as predictable in its concerns and its tone, as it sounds, but it also has a fun, observant sense of humor; an intelligence that, amidst the usual, poserish name-dropping of famous thinkers, seems substantial and engaged; and fluid, sensitive prose that renders unnecessary Gessen's nervous intrusions -- pictures of Hegel and Lincoln, a screenshot of an e-mail inbox -- upon the text. In its satirical treatment of bookish neurotics and their muddled love lives, there's a bit of Woody Allen, while its bursting, earnest emotion recalls A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Gessen's twee arch-nemesis, Dave Eggers. Its sonorous dips into the past emulate Philip Roth, but its most persistent model, as the novel's title (which comes from All the Sad Young Men, a 1926 story collection) hints, is F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose delicate, wise, expressive lyricism Gessen attempts to transport to a milieu whose primary components -- coffee shops, cell phones, Internet pornography -- do not easily accommodate it. He does this perhaps to counteract the irony-soaked glibness that boyish, well-educated writers, no matter how feeling, never can avoid entirely. The tactic is not wholly unsuccessful, but usually Gessen ends up with the lyricism of This Side of Paradise and not of The Great Gatsby.
All the Sad Young Literary Men follows, in rotating chapters, three would-be litterateurs through their twenties. Mark is a divorced graduate student in Syracuse, working on a dissertation about the Menshiviks. Sam, a child of secular Jews, wants to write "the great Zionist epic." Keith's chapters, which, unlike the others, are narrated in the first person, recollect his undergraduate days and his Russian family. Our heroes' stories are barely connected, but the three characters have much in common. Each is thoughtful, a bit prickly and worrisome, well-read, interested in politics and history, highly self-conscious but not quite self-aware, and extremely articulate but not quite sure what he wants to say. Each has ambitions of achieving intellectual renown but feels trapped in slackerdom, with its romantic catastrophes, money-saving schemes, and impotent ideological meandering.
Some critics have referred to the book as a roman à clef, and indeed several characters are transparently based upon real-life figures: For example, Lauren, the Harvard princess who awes Keith when his roommate brings her back to their dorm room, is Al Gore's daughter Kristin, and Lomaski, "who'd made a few groundbreaking discoveries in his late twenties before moving on to the comparatively glorious task of protesting American involvement in Vietnam, and then the significantly less glorious task of protesting its involvement everywhere else," is Noam Chomsky. For this reason (and the other, even more obvious reason), it's tempting to assume that the character Keith is based upon the author Keith, and in many ways this obviously is true (they both are writers of Russian heritage, educated at Harvard). But Gessen gives pieces of himself to all his protagonists, including Sam, the aspiring novelist, and Mark, the recipient of Gessen's early divorce and graduate school years at Syracuse. As a result, they all have roughly the same voice -- Gessen's -- and so it's easy to lose track of which anxieties, which desires, and which failed relationships belong to which character, because they're all described in the same way.
Fortunately, the guys don't blur together nearly as much as their girlfriends do. Because Mark, Keith, and Sam each have multiple love interests, it would be difficult enough to keep them straight even if their personalities were more diverse, but each is intelligent and pretty, with a soul somehow less tormented than Mark's, Keith's, or Sam's. Gessen sometimes invents a good detail or two for his female characters -- one "had such control of tone, in her text messages, she was the Edith Wharton of text messaging" -- but he never gives them his full attention, and they mostly remain faceless.
Among the males, Keith, less bumbling than the other two, stands out in that, although he can make jokes, he himself is not comic like Mark or Sam. While they blunder, he reminisces, sieving from his experiences in late adolescence some of the knowledge that, with any luck, comes with growing up. Keith's first section, which recalls his four disappointing years at Harvard, highlighted by his roommate's flirtation with Al Gore's daughter and by an unsuccessful term paper about Abraham Lincoln, is my favorite, despite an unattributed gag taken from The Simpsons. The remembrance ends nicely:
Afterward, Keith continues to make pronouncements, in the Fitzgeraldian manner, about youth and its inevitable death -- "it was the last time I'd ever feel that strange, expectant, hopeful, pleading way" and then "we would not be so beautiful as we were, and our teeth would not be so bright" -- and even meets an older writer who channels The Crack-Up and tells him that, despite his plans and his promise, "one day you look up and you've done all the things you said you were going to do but somehow you forgot something, something happened along the way and everyone's gone, everything's different, and looking around you see you have the same screwed-up life as all those other idiots."
But when he's working in this mode, Gessen occasionally gets a little too excited and zeitgeist-hungry, like Eggers does ("What if it was happening, in New York, not a few blocks from them, what if they knew someone to whom it was happening, or who was making it happen -- what if they were blind to it? What if it wasn't them?"), and, when anguished, his soulfully sincere speechifying becomes heavy-handed: "We hurt one another. We go through life dressing up in new clothes and covering up our true motives. We meet up lightly, we drink rosé wine, and then we give each other pain." This last revelation concludes that our displays of affection for one another "merely postpone the moment when we'll push these people off, and beat forward, beat forward on our little raft, alone," borrowing not quite subtly enough from the most famous line in American literature. It can be dangerous to follow even Fitzgerald too closely.
Meanwhile, Sam and Mark stumble about humorously in Boston and upstate New York. Mark likes to compare his love life and personal problems to events in Russian history, and these comparisons sometimes work, and sometimes they seem like labored, pointless displays of erudition: "If meeting Celeste post-boyfriend was like arriving in March of 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?"
In what is intended to be the novel's comic piece de resistance, Sam frets over his shrinking Internet presence, as Google finds fewer and fewer pages containing his name every time he searches. This leads him to call up Google to ask if they'll alter their algorithm so that his name will yield more hits, and when Google refuses, he tries to convince a friend to hack into the search engine and alter the algorithm for him. It's a funny, manic chapter in the style of The Corrections, but it's not really plausible; it feels out of context and imitative here, and maybe this sort of frenzied comedy is never really that plausible anyway. But the book does have laughs, and Gessen blends his skill as a cultural commentator seamlessly into the narrative, making amusing remarks about contemporary life. Witness Mark at the gym, when a friend asks why he uses only the StairMaster:
"And the treadmills?"
"The treadmills are a menace! You're not doing anything, you're just lifting your feet up. It's a big lie."
Eventually, Sam takes a grave journey to Israel and then to the Palestinian city Jenin in the West Bank, where, in a novel that flirts with issues of worldwide importance but mostly addresses them parenthetically in order to describe the belittling angst and careerist covetousness they inflict upon the book's comparatively puny characters, perhaps the book's ultimate seriousness should come to light, but the segment seems disjointed, and not enough happens.
The novel as a whole, in fact, is somewhat unsatisfying in this way. All the Sad Young Literary Men is, I think, less than the sum of its often clever parts. Its triptych structure seems, in the end, like a deliberate avoidance of the complications of a single, longer narrative's composition; the book comes across as a series of entertaining but inconsequential sketches, appended with a conventional novelistic conclusion that might shine a ray of hope upon the universe its story has created, but there is no universe here -- just three characters and their brief, disconnected adventures.
Yet there is powerful material about growing up, about our wish to be important and substantial and how to manage all the petty forces and the distractions -- dating, parking tickets, beer pong, evil politicians, the Web -- that, compounded with our own uncertainties and silly vanities, seem to prevent us from the becoming the sort of adult human beings we'd like to be. I think that Keith Gessen will write some very good novels, if he's set upon being a novelist -- if he's not merely an editor and intellectual ringleader who has decided here to memorialize the coming of age of his coterie. I think that, like his characters, he still has some growing up ahead of him.
Right now, even his fine prose depends too much upon preset cadences. He likes, for example, to pause in the middle of a clause as if to take a breath, repeat its subject, and then resume.
To be poor in New York was humiliating, a little, but to be young -- to be young was divine.
Jillian, my fiancée, was visiting her family in California, and I, I had raced up to New York in our car.
She was going to med school, and I -- I was going to write.
But the Israelis -- well, the Israelis were fuckers.
And that -- he wanted to explain this to her somehow -- that may be all you were going to get, in this life.
That last one suffers from an unfortunate mixture of tenses as well. And Gessen also likes to end chapters with pithy sentences that start with conjunctions:
But that doesn't make it one long party.
But he could not fall asleep.
And outside already it was growing dark.
I suppose Gessen must learn to trust his own voice. It is, after all, a witty, graceful voice. But this rather typical first novel leaves us with the typical hopes for next time around -- that the fledgling novelist will expand his focus, occasionally work his way into a consciousness that is not his own, brave a more complicated and demanding structure, advance his style, and create a fuller, deeper work of fiction. Keith Gessen can't remain young forever.
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