The Worst Ever

C'est Moi!

This is a photo of me at the William R. Perkins library at Duke University. Quinn took it while I was visiting her. She was too truthful an an artist to Photoshop out the pimple I had on my forehead. I still like the picture.

It's a predictably excellent-seeming library, despite huge, skeletal areas of empty shelves in the stacks. (Digitization?!) It has a huge variety of fiction, which maybe isn't always the case with college libraries, although, annoyingly, as I might have guessed, no Herta Müller was in stock. I convinced Quinn to take out five novels for me: Young Törless by Robert Musil, Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser, The Ballad of Dingus Magee by David Markson, Miss Wyoming by Douglas Coupland, and Home Land by Sam Lipsyte. I can keep them until the end of her spring semester, but I'm sure I'll finish them long before then. They're all pretty short.

I really wish I lived within walking distance of such a place and had perpetual access to its collection. But, of course, if I were a student, I wouldn't have much time to read novels, and I'd probably visit the library only by necessity. Life is funny like that.

The Other Story

Recently I've been thinking a bit about novels that take place, to some extent, inside other novels -- books that borrow stories and characters from other writers and then flip things around, telling the tale from the perspective of a minor character, selecting as major plot points episodes only briefly touched upon in the earlier work, and filling in gaps with new occurrences, new people, and new ideas. Famous examples include Grendel and Wide Sargasso Sea.

These are sometimes called "parallel novels." The idea behind the term must be that this new story is transpiring alongside the old one in the same fictional universe, but I think it's a misnomer: parallel lines do not intersect, but here, intersection is the point. The author meets the events of the earlier story from a different angle, mining them for lost details and hidden implications. In the case of Wide Sargasso Sea, "perpendicular novel" seems more appropriate than "parallel novel."

This is hardly a major genre, but there are plenty of reasons for a novelist to be attracted to it. Some merely wish to enter into a dialogue with a great writer. Others attempt to engage the classics in moral warfare, often objecting on ideological grounds to their treatment of certain characters: in Wide Sargasso Sea, the Dominican novelist Jean Rhys humanizes Jane Eyre's madwoman in the attic, the Caribbean first wife of Mr. Rochester, whose insanity Charlotte Bronte unsympathetically traces, with more than a hint of typical 19th-century racism, to her Creole heritage. Margaret Atwood has confessed that The Penelopiad, a wry novella narrated by Odysseus's wife, was inspired by a small incident in the Odyssey that Homer passes over in only a few lines: the senseless hanging of Penelope's 12 maids, a disturbing moment that snagged Atwood's attention when she was a young reader. In Grendel, John Gardner applies a bleakly modern, existentialist worldview to the ancient epic Beowulf, which casts human history as a heroic narrative, the triumphant battle of good against evil, where "good" and "evil" are distinct and knowable. Here, one of Beowulf's villains becomes the protagonist.

Of this fine trio, Wide Sargasso Sea is probably the best book, but I especially relate to Atwood's impetus for writing. The Penelopiad is frequently (and not incorrectly) called a "feminist take" on the Odyssey, but to me it's less a rewrite than it is an expansion. When I think about it, I think about all the times when, listening to an anecdote, I've gotten hung up on the irrelevant details, hoping for the storyteller to explain these, which to me were more interesting than the main thrust of the tale. Atwood explores the directions Homer didn't take; she focuses on the domestic comedies and tragedies that Odysseus's adventure pushed out of the frame and adopts the voices that Homer's homophonic poem could not accommodate.

These books remind us that every story we read or hear is actually just one version of a million potential stories. The story of one football team's thrilling Super Bowl victory is also the story of another's heartbreaking defeat. For the veteran quarterback, the game is the climax of his career; for the rookie wideout who catches one pass, it is an auspicious beginning. For the ant squished in the stadium concourse, it is a tragedy; for the hot dog vendor, it's just another day at work. For the celebrating fan, it's the cause of his DUI, which in turn causes him to quit drinking. For the TV viewer whose wife has left him that day, it's the background noise of devastation.

One of the purposes of storytelling is to whittle the world down to a pleasing size, to shape it in such a way that events, though they may mean many things, do not mean all things; they are part of a beginning or a middle or an end, part of a coherent unit of life for a specific person or group of people, whom they affect in positive or negative or neutral ways. In a story, we do not get every perspective; if we did, the result would be chaos. It would be not a story but life itself, where everything that happens is crucial and insignificant, familiar and distant, ugly and beautiful, happy and sad, clear and opaque, a start and a midpoint and a finish; in short, everything is everything, instead of being something, as stories require. This makes me think that the "omniscient narrator" is a myth; if he really were omniscient, he wouldn't know what to say -- there would be too much. Have you ever driven on a busy highway and considered that every person in every car you see has a life that is as important to him as yours is to you? It's overwhelming.

Another purpose of storytelling is to help us understand the world, and one thing we must understand is that there are countless ways of understanding it. Every detail is worth getting hung up on. This, too, can seem overwhelming. "Parallel novels" both dramatize the problem and chip away at it; each suggests that we must learn to view stories from multiple perspectives, and then it sketches one perspective we might take. It is both hermeneutic and creative, which is, I think, the right way to approach life: subjecting what we see to vigorous interpretation and using our imagination to conjure as much as we can of that which lies outside our field of view.

There are works that function much like Grendel and The Penelopiad without using prior fiction as their starting point. The first such book I read was a children's story called Ben and Me, which told of the life of Benjamin Franklin from the perspective of a mouse, who, according to the author, was largely responsible for many of Franklin's inventions. The 2006 movie Bobby starts with an historical event with which we all are familiar -- the assassination of Robert Kennedy -- but portrays it obliquely, following a chef, a waitress, a singer, and a beautician around the Ambassador Hotel on the day of the shooting and attempting to figure out what June 6, 1968 meant to them. Many films are self-reflexively hermeneutic, inventing a series of events and then revising it again and again as it moves from one character's interpretation of the events in question to another's; this is the influence of Rashomon and can be seen in Courage Under Fire and One Night at McCool's. None of these movies are really great, but their structure makes them more interesting than they might otherwise be.

Writing about all this has also reminded me of a few classic novels like My Ántonia and The Great Gatsby, narratives that are one degree removed from their titular characters. Gatsby is the tragic hero of Fitzgerald's novel, and Ántonia is the heroine of Cather's, but Fitzgerald and Cather do not tell us of Gatsby or Ántonia directly; instead, we see these characters through a couple of less glamorous intermediaries, Nick Carraway and Jim Burden, their neighbors. Nick and Jim are only minor players in the lives of Gatsby and Ántonia, but their interpretations of the novels' protagonists provide additional layers of meaning to their triumphs and tragedies. Episodes in the lives of Gatsby and Ántonia take on a different significance for the onlookers than they do for the participants. Rather than witnessing only Gatsby's lavish lifestyle and doomed yearnings and Ántonia's rough beauty and free spirit, we also learn what they mean to an unambitious bond salesman and a mild-mannered lawyer, who aggregate and analyze details that their idols would ignore. In the end, these inglorious biographers seem as important as their subjects; we care about the fates of Gatsby and Antonia, but we care just as much about how their fates affect their observers, whose modest lives and profound reflections illuminate as much of the human condition as do the fireworks of their charismatic counterparts. Each novel gives us two stories in one -- the story of the doer and the the story of the watcher. The effect is something like having Homer's Odysseus and Atwood's Penelope in the same volume.

Speaking of which, I've done a little Internet research, which has yielded some more novels featuring characters who, like Atwood's Penelope, have been appropriated from famous stories in they played secondary roles and have been repositioned as protagonists. At some point, I'll certainly check out Updike's Gertrude and Claudius, a sort of prequel to Hamlet. Ursula K. Le Guin's Lavinia apparently gives voice to a silent character from Virgil's Aeneid, and it's supposed to be good, but I never finished reading the Aeneid, and I have no idea who Lavinia is, so maybe Tony would get more out of that one. Geraldine Brooks's March, based on Little Women, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, but I'm even more unfamiliar with Louisa May Alcott than I am with Virgil, though I feel considerably less guilty about it. Mary Reilly, Valerie Martin's retelling of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, looks promising, as does Jon Clinch's Finn, which concerns the deadbeat father of Huckleberry Finn. The most famous work of this kind, however, may be a play, not a novel: Tom Stoppard's delightful Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which, funnily enough, seems to argue against the theory that the minor personages of fiction can, from an alternate perspective, be heroes, too. Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are helpless and interchangeable pawns trapped inside Shakespeare's plot, compelled by forces they don't understand to perform confusing actions and suffer absurd deaths. It's Hamlet's world, and they're just living in it (for now).

While we're on this subject, it may be worth your time to read Anthony Hecht's poem "The Dover Bitch," provided you already know Matthew Arnold's immortal "Dover Beach." It's a funny send-up, which views Arnold's love through the eyes of a sympathetic friend who understands why her relationship with the plaintive Victorian poet didn't work out.

Can you think of any other works belonging to this genre? Which are your favorites?

A New, Old, Old, New, New Novel

When J.M.G. Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year, few Americans had heard of him, and fewer still had read any of his books. Only a couple of his titles, published by small presses, were in print in English at the time of the Swedish Academy's announcement.

Since then, more of his books have appeared or reappeared in English -- including his famous 1963 debut, The Interrogation, which won Le Clézio the prix Renaudot when he was only 23. Daphne Woodward's 1964 translation, long out of print, has been reissued in hardcover by Simon & Schuster.

It is a novel about a young man named Adam Pollo, an eccentric 29-year-old loafer who occupies a house near a beach in France. The home does not belong to him, and he fears its owners will return and have him arrested. He may have escaped from the army or from a mental institution. The Interrogation chronicles the various mundane activities with which he passes the time -- playing billiards, going to the zoo, following a dog around town -- and records his many ruminations and hallucinations.

It belongs to a phase of Le Clézio's work that, by most accounts, ended in the mid '70s, when his anguished, inward experiments in form and style gave way to a broader, more humane approach to his fiction, which now addressed the outside world in an accessible lyricism that many critics praised and others called middlebrow. The Interrogation, on the other hand, seems to have been written expressly for the literary vanguard of the 1960s. All the right influences -- The Stranger, Nausea, Robbe-Grillet, and Kafka, as well as the early films by Godard and Truffaut -- are apparent. It's full of opaque psychologizing and esoteric metaphysics; it is light on plot, has no interest in any characters outside of its protagonist, and includes the requisite typographical oddities (chapters are labeled alphabetically instead of numerically, for example).

Today, however, The Interrogation seems very much a period piece -- a pastiche of the dominant cultural forces of its time and place, lacking the creative spark that can make old novels seem forever new. Many of its predecessors live, but this novel belongs to a mode of fiction that has become extinct. It comes from an era when alienated, abstracted young men were considered far more interesting than they are now, when a youthful author could fill a book with the reflections that such people, "enjoying fear, idleness and the unusual," tend to have and, without placing them within a narrative, providing an alternate perspective, or even writing gracefully or coherently, win major literary awards for it. Today, a 23-year-old Le Clézio might just write a Xanga. I do not think there remains a large audience for the garrulous ennui of chain-smoking café patrons ("It's ridiculous how much time I waste doing nothing in particular," Adam brags). If Le Clézio had not won the Nobel Prize, The Interrogation would never have seen republication in English.

I have come to believe, moreover, that, if one is to write a novel about an alienated, abstracted young man, it may be better if the novelist himself is not an alienated, abstracted young man. It is useful to compare The Interrogation to The Catcher in the Rye. As a voice for disaffected youth, Salinger clearly was an inspiration for Le Clézio, and Adam Pollo borrows some of Holden Caulfield's madness, his zany whims and his troubled obsession with the atomic bomb. But Salinger gave Holden a story and a universe to inhabit, which helped Holden uncover aspects of himself that would have remained unrevealed without external prompts; Holden himself would not have bothered to invent Stradlater or Sally Hayes or the Edmont Hotel. The Interrogation, though written in the third person, seems not only to be about Adam Pollo but also to have been created by Adam Pollo.

In Le Clézio's self-conscious introduction ("I would like my story be taken as a complete fiction, interesting only in so far as it produces a kind of repercussion [however briefly] upon the reader's mind . . . I apologize for any slips or typing mistakes . . ."), the author confesses, "I have a stronger and stronger impression that there is no such thing as reality." This probably was a fashionable declaration at one point, but it may render one ill-equipped to write a novel, which traditionally hinges on the premise that life matters, that the fate of people matters. But Adam suspects more and more that he is "the one and only living creature in the world." He sees other people "all doing the same thing . . . all talking at the same time and telling one another the same things" -- to him, "the lives of individual men and women don't matter." For this reason, we learn nothing about Adam's only human contact, a girl named Michèle, who on occasional visits exchanges cryptic dialogue with him:

'I'm cold . . . I'm cold, I'm very cold . . .'
Adam did not shrink from the touch of the girl's body; indeed, he even took her hand -- a soft, slender, warm hand -- and repeated, as they walked on:
'You're cold? You're cold?'
To which Michèle replied:
'Yes.'

Instead, we hear the details of Adam's own idleness, learn more and more about his growing detachment from reality (he cannot remember if there has recently been a war in Europe, he imagines that he is a spider or a slug or a mouse, he makes love only "with his mind far away"), and read descriptions of phantasms, where, for example, the

sky seemed ready to break away and crash down on our heads. The sun, ditto. He looked at the ground and saw it suddenly melting, boiling, or flowing beneath his feet. The trees grew excited and gave off poisonous vapours. The sea began to swell, devoured the narrow grey strip of beach and then rose, rose to attack the hill, to drown him, moving towards him, to numb him, to swallow him up in its dirty waves.

There are pages and pages of this stuff. To Le Clézio, all of Adam's visions are fascinating, all of his monologues worthy of transcription. But Adam's is the sort of self-absorption that, because it is unaccompanied by a self-critical instinct or by an exterior counterpoint, does not illuminate much about the self. Le Clézio seems rather impressed by his hero's insanity, as if insanity were a natural extension of intelligence in the modern world. So when Adam's thoughts make sense, good -- and when they don't, even better:

All the components of the telephone are present in the rhinoceros. Emery paper and magic lanterns have always existed; and the moon is really sun and sun moon, the earth is Mars, Jupiter, a whisky and soda and that queer instrument that will soon be invented to create objects or destroy them, its structure known by heart already.

The Interrogation's dust jacket claims that French critics greeted the novel with an enthusiastic cry that "finally the real voice of the young" had appeared. Perhaps it had. Consider one long sentence that describes the protagonist's anomie:

Adam huddled on his stool; shut in by a strange old age, he was quietly resuming his place in the sun, in the deserted house at the top of the hill, taking no interest in the countryside, in the town or the sea, no interest in the aircraft that flew along the horizon, sometimes noisy, sometimes silent, no interest in ocean cruises or in the fine, realistic books people occasionally write after their military service, recording in meticulous detail that on a certain day in a certain month of June they were told to swill out the latrines directly after being made to peel forty pounds of potatoes; no interest in the many who are incapable of dying for love of a diadem spider, for the languors of nature, who cannot be brought to the verge of tears when the silence is rent by a drop of water falling into the waste-pipe of a washbasin.

Petulance and sentimentality notwithstanding, this is not bad, and you can, for a moment, see what the critics meant. But for a novel to succeed, it must be more than a voice, if the voice is as limited as Adam's. The Interrogation has very little else. Many of its pages are occupied by monotonously realistic description of the kind Adam apparently scorns, but this strikes me merely as filler:

A sort of cast-iron grating encircled the park. On the south side it bordered the main road, parallel to the sea, and there was a big gate half-way along; on either side of the gate stood a kind of wooden sentry-box, keeping the sun off a pair of women in their fifties who say knitting or reading thrillers. In front of each of the women, on a board that stuck out from the window of the sentry-box, lay a roll of pink tickets traversed at regular intervals by rows of perforations so that they could be easily torn off.

In fact, despite the author's obvious striving toward innovation, there is a good deal of earnest literary effort of this customary variety, with moments of halting lyricism (a postcard is said to be "translucent as sugar," though neither postcards nor sugar usually is particularly translucent) and heavy spiritual yearning, as when Adam hopes that "they'll sentence me to some kind of of punishment, so that I can pay with my whole body for the crime of being alive; if they humiliate me, whip me, spit in my face, I shall at last have a destiny, I shall at last believe in God." This is, after all, the sort of book in which, because the protagonist imagines that soon "there will be only one man, only one woman, left in the world," that protagonist must, with dreary significance, be called Adam.

But the deeper we venture into the novel, the deeper Le Clézio descends into modish incoherence, with Adam raving in long paragraphs about philosophy, psychology, and even geometry, and into textual gimmicks, where we find words crossed out, pages from a newspaper (not just those articles relevant to the novel) bound into the book, and sections missing.

Perhaps it's silly to expect much from a novel written by a 23-year-old, even if that 23-year-old caused a sensation in French literary circles and, 45 years later, won the Nobel Prize. (Truman Capote was 23 when he wrote Other Voices, Other Rooms, but never mind.) But Le Clézio's Desert, which received the 1980 Grand Prix Paul Morand from the French Academy and to many marked the author's breakthrough as a mature novelist, was published in English a few days ago. I won't write off Le Clézio before I've read it. Even a wonder boy, an overnight sensation, can have a slow start.

The Lost Boys

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:

In my secret dreams of Harvard, of what Harvard would mean for me, it was of course I who slept with, or almost-slept with -- that would have been fine! -- the Veep's handsome daughter. But to have a roommate who did -- well that is also something. And to realize this, that it is something, may just be the beginning of wisdom -- or almost-wisdom, as the case may have been. Sometimes you end up in bed, was the idea -- but sometimes you're just the guy on the couch, writing your Lincoln paper, smiling at some of the things that have been said, and half hoping you'll fall asleep.

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:

"I don't trust the ellipticals," he managed, even as his interval training took him into the higher exertion brackets. "I haven't seen the studies. It's like the number of peasant deaths during collectivization." He tried to take a breath. "No reliable statistics."

"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.

Last Words: #13 in a Series

From Snow (2002) by Orhan Pamuk (translated by Maureen Freely):

I bought my ticket and a sandwich for the little dog my friend had mentioned in his poem. The dog wagged his curly tail happily as he approached me, and I was still feeding him the sandwich when I saw Turgut Bey and Kadife rushing into the station. They'd only just heard from Zahide that I'd gone. We exchanged a few pleasantries about the ticket agent, the journey, the snow. Turgut Bey reached shamefacedly into his pocket and pulled out a new edition of First Love, the Turgenev novel he'd translated from the French while he was in prison. Ömercan was sitting on Kadife's lap, and I stroked his head. His mother's head was wrapped in one of her elegant Istanbul scarves, and the snow it had collected was falling from the edges. Afraid to look too long into his wife's beautiful eyes, I turned back to Fazil and asked him whether he knew now what he might want to say to my readers if I ever was to write a book set in Kars.

"Nothing." His voice was determined.

When he saw my face fall, he relented. "I did think of something, but you may not like it," he said. "If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I'd like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away."

"But no one believes in that way what he reads in a novel," I said.

"Oh, yes, they do," he cried. "If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would put in what I've just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds."

I promised I would put what he'd said into my novel.

When Kadife saw me eyeing the station entrance, she came toward me. "I hear you have a beautiful little daughter called Rüya," she said. "My sister isn't coming, but she asked me to send warm wishes to you and your daughter. And I brought you this memento of my short theatrical career." She gave me a photograph of herself with Sunay Zaim on the stage of the National Theater.

The stationmaster blew the whistle. I think I was the only one boarding the train. One by one, I embraced them. At the last moment, Fazil passed me a plastic bag; inside were copies he'd made of the videos and a ballpoint pen that had once belonged to Necip.

By now the train was moving, and it took some effort to jump into the car with my hands so full of presents. They were all standing on the platform waving, and I leaned out the window to wave back. It was only at the last moment that I saw the charcoal-colored dog, its pink tongue hanging from its mouth. It ran happily alongside me, right to the end of the platform. They all disappeared into the thick-falling snow.

I sat down and as I looked out the window through the snow at the orange lights of the outermost houses of the outlying neighborhoods, the shabby rooms full of people watching television, and the last snow-covered rooftops, the thin and elegantly quivering ribbons of smoke rising from the broken chimseys at last seemed a smudge through my tears.

Last Words: #12 in a Series

From Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison:

I'm shaking off the old skin and I'll leave it here in the hole. I'm coming out, no less invisible without it, but coming out nevertheless. And I suppose it's damn well time. Even hibernations can be overdone, come to think of it. Perhaps that's my greatest social crime, I've overstayed my hibernation, since there's a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play.

"Ah," I can hear you say, "so it was all a build-up to bore us with his buggy jiving. He only wanted us to listen to him rave!" But only partially true: Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me:

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

Last Words: #11 in a Series

From The Master of Petersburg (1994) by J.M. Coetzee:

It takes him no more than ten minutes to write the scene, with not a word blotted. In a final version it would have to be fuller, but for the present purposes this is enough. He gets up, leaving the two pages open on the table.

It is an assault upon the innocence of a child. It is an act for which he can expect no forgiveness. With it he has crossed the threshold. Now God must speak, now God dare no longer remain silent. To corrupt a child is to force God. The device he has made arches and springs shut like a trap, a trap to catch God.

He knows what he is doing. At the same time, in this contest of cunning between himself and God, he is outside himself, perhaps outside his soul. Somewhere he stands and watches while he and God circle each other. And time stands still and watches too. Time is suspended, everything is suspended before the fall.

I have lost my place in my soul, he thinks.

He picks up his hat and leaves his lodgings. He does not recognize the hat, has no idea whose shoes he is wearing. In fact, he recognizes nothing of himself. If he were to look in a mirror now, he would not be surprised if another face were to loom up, staring back blindly at him.

He has betrayed everyone; nor does he see that his betrayals could go deeper. If he ever wanted to know whether betrayal tasted more like vinegar or like gall, now is the time.

But there is no taste at all in his mouth, just as there is no weight on his heart. His heart, in fact, feels quite empty. He had not known beforehand it would be like this. But how could he have known? Not torment but a dull absence of torment. Like a soldier shot on a battlefield, bleeding, seeing the blood, feeling no pain, wondering: Am I dead already?

It seems to him a great price to pay. They pay him lots of money for writing books, said the child, repeating the dead child. What they failed to say was that he had to give up his soul in return.

Now he begins to taste it. It tastes like gall.

Last Words: #10 in a Series

From Going After Cacciato (1978) by Tim O'Brien:

Late that day they were within radio range. The lieutenant made the call. Missing in action, he said. He spelled out Cacciato's name phonetically, repeated it, his voice calm. He smiled when it was done. Then they were moving again, down from the mountains, through the rough country. The march was easy now.

At suppertime they made camp along a narrow irrigation ditch. They dug their holes and set out the tripflares and prepared for night. In the morning, with luck, they would reach the sea.

Night spread up the ditch and passed over them and rolled toward the mountains.

They talked softly. They talked of rumors. An observation post by the sea, easy duty, a place to swim and get solid tans and fish for red snapper. Later they talked about going home. It would become a war story. People would laugh and shake their heads, nobody would believe a word. Just one more war story. Then Oscar talked about two women he knew, and how, when he got home, he would choose the one who most hated war stories. This made Harold Murphy talk quietly about his wife. The lieutenant did not talk at all.

When full dark came, they moved to their separate holes along the ditch. The stars were out. And soon the moon appeared, very pale at first, but then turning bright as it passed over the mountains.

Paul Berlin slept. There were no dreams. When he awoke he saw that the lieutenant was sitting with him.

Together they kept the guard.

They watched the immense stillness of the paddies, the serenity of things, the moon climbing beyond the mountains. Sometimes it was hard to believe it was a war.

"I guess it's better this way," the old man finally said. "There's worse things can happen. There's plenty of worse things."

"True enough, sir."

"And who knows? He might make it. He might do all right." The lieutenant's voice was flat like the land. "Miserable odds, but--"

"But maybe."

"Yes," the lieutenant said. "Maybe so."

Last Words: #9 in a Series

From The Gambler (1867) by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew):

I don't object to what he said about me personally. But after all . . . well, it's nothing but words, words, words, and what we need is action, not words. The main thing is Switzerland, of course. Ah, if I could go there tomorrow! I could recover there, come back to life. I ought to prove it to them. . . . Let Paulina see that I can still become a man. It will only take me . . . It's too late today, but tomorrow . . . Ah, I have a premonition -- I can't miss! I have fifteen louis d'or now, instead of the ten gulden I was going to start playing with. If I start very carefully . . . Why am I really such an irresponsible infant? Can't I see that I am a doomed man? But why can't I come back to life? All I have to do is to be calculating and patient once, and I'll make it! I have to hold out for just one hour, and then my whole life will be different. The main thing is a strong will. Just remember what happened to me seven months ago in Roulettenburg, before I lost everything. Oh, it was a beautiful instance of determination. . . . I lost everything I had then. . . . I walked out of the Casino, and suddenly discovered that I still had one gulden in my waistcoat pocket. Well, that'll pay for my dinner at least, I said. But after I had taken a hundred steps or so, I changed my mind and went back to the roulette table. I staked that gulden on manque (yes, that time I played manque). And it's true, it gives you a special feeling when you are all alone in a foreign country, far away from your home and your friends, not knowing whether you're going to eat that day, and gambling your very last gulden! I won, and twenty minutes later I left the Casino with one hundred and seventy gulden in my pocket. It's the absolute truth! That's what your very last gulden can sometimes do for you! But suppose I had lost heart then? What if I hadn't dared to risk? . . .

Tomorrow, tomorrow, it will all be over!

Last Words: #8 in a Series

From The Loved One (1948) by Evelyn Waugh:

On this last evening in Los Angeles Dennis knew that he was singularly privileged. The strand was littered with bones and wreckage. He was adding his bit; something that had long irked him, his young heart. He was carrying back instead a great, shapeless chunk of experience, the artist's load; bearing it home to his ancient and comfortless shore; to work on it hard and long, for God knew how long -- it was the moment of vision for which a lifetime is often too short.

He picked up the novel which Miss Poski had left on his desk and settled down to await his loved one's final combustion.