All the Sad Young Literary Men
Keith Gessen, Viking, 2008

All the Sad Young Literary Men, Keith Gessen, Viking, 2008

There is a window of opportunity that a novelist has to hit if he wants to write a credibly wise book. Try it when you’re too young and you expose yourself as naïve and inexperienced. Wait until you’re too old and you risk coming off like an aged grump, too inflexible in his thought patterns to truly understand how the world works. I have no idea when the window opens and when it closes (I’m in my early 40s and I don’t feel like I’m going to be closing in on wisdom any time soon) but I would guess that the range falls somewhere between 50 and 70. What is certain is that Keith Gessen isn’t there yet. The characters in his first novel, for all their big-world philosophizing and self-conscious political posturing, are so painfully young that they are extremely difficult to take seriously. 

The book – I’m not sure if Gessen wants it to be called a novel or not (young people are sensitive about such things these days) – consists of episodes involving three young men. Mark is an under-motivated graduate student who is unable to muster much enthusiasm for his dissertation and thus is having trouble focusing long enough to get it done. Sam is a secular Jew who has decided to write the great Zionist novel; he looks to those around him for opinions about the political situation in Israel since he doesn’t have much of an opinion himself. Consequently, he’s having a lot of trouble focusing on his novel long enough to get it done. Keith is more earnest than the other two but accomplishes even less than his colleagues over the course of the book; he, in fact, doesn’t do much more than worry. 

The three men are connected tangentially, but they never cross paths in the course of the narrative. The characters have no relationship with one another, and absent the points of reference that interaction would give the reader it is nearly impossible to tell them apart. It has been suggested that the characters represent different aspects of Gessen’s own personality, which would explain why they all seem like the same person – although they couldn’t be convincingly argued to represent different aspects of anything. In retrospect, I am unable to differentiate between the three men beyond a biographical fact or two: Sam is the reluctant Zionist; Mark is the one who used to be married; Keith is the one who isn’t either of those. 

The men are all well educated underachievers who are defined mostly by their inability to develop a successful romantic relationship. The platoon of women to whom the trio are unable to commit are nearly as homogeneous as Sam, Mark and Keith, but a few of them are more sharply drawn than the protagonists. Sasha is a pouty, moody Russian; Talia is a militant Israeli; Arielle, her foil, is a self-indulgent leftist. These three I can remember, but there are many others – beautiful grad students, sex advice columnists and others whose beauty and apartments in Cambridge or NYC presumably make them extremely desirable. 

Sam, Mark, and Keith look for relief from their disappointing lives by trying to find personal metaphors in big issues. Sam goes to the West Bank and concludes, finally, that neither the occupying Israelis nor the Palestinian suicide bombers have the moral high ground; only someone in their 20s could be surprised by that revelation. Mark is obsessed with his research about a marginal group of revolutionaries in Russia, also-rans who slipped into obscurity after the Bolsheviks gained power. And Keith, well, Keith is mostly worried that in 10 years he’ll be even more lethargic and boring than he is now. 

Despite all the Ivy League introspection, though, all that the three of them are really interested in is sex. They limp from one dreary relationship to another, powerless to turn away from women they don’t love because, if they did, who would they sleep with? 

These characters are so young that it hurts to read about them. Gessen is extremely successful at creating these immature guys, if that is his aim. The title’s reference to a collection of Fitzgerald stories suggests that he is, indeed, attempting to present the egocentric idleness of privileged youth, and he does it elegantly. His version of rock-bottom excess – binge drinking and Internet porn – is both breathtakingly contemporary and surprisingly conservative. He also gives us timely references to our era’s Power Point-influenced postmodern literature by including photos, tables and bullet-point lists. 

He gives us ignorant young men so convinced of their own power that they look at the washed-up, jaded old men around them – we’re talking about men in their mid-30s here – with horror, terrified that these elderly husks might foreshadow their own futures. The laughable childishness in this viewpoint might be compelling in the hands of a capable writer who is wiser than his characters, which Gessen might be one day.

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