All the Sad, Young, Literary Men

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All the Sad, Young, Literary Men

POSTED: Monday, April 21, 2008, 9:00 PM

Errors and graces

Viking, 242 pp., April 11, 2008

Keith Gessen’s debut novel, All the Sad, Young, Literary Men, is a 242-page look at three guys from the current generation of self-obsessed intellectuals. They are (together, not all) Jewish, Harvard graduates, one’s married, the other two aren’t, and they’re in and out of grad school and New York City pursuing sex and publication as they stumble into their 30s and — gasp! — delayed adulthood.

Gessen co-founded highbrow lit mag n+1, but he keeps things light here. Yes, his characters obsess over Hegel, Israel and their own places in history, but hey, check out the funny photos in chapter one. The writing is compressed and breezy, with the dry, self-effacing humor you’d expect from a book named after F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story collection All the Sad Young Men.

Likewise, this novel has sections, one per character. The result is a little awkward. We see Keith (the author, thinly veiled), Sam and Mark grumbling, blogging and half-loving various women, including former students. Their experiences blur together. The conflicts are 99 percent mental, and this gets boring. Strangely, the three guys never meet.

The central joke is that even Ivy League grads surf online porn, prefer younger women, fret about sex, don’t like office jobs, and know that law school isn’t a bad option. It takes Gessen 200 pages to get to a so-so punchline, when the guys begin to change.

The standout chapters are “Isaac Babel” (Keith sees a mentor — and one possible future — crumble in a well-written scene) and “Jenin” (Sam’s visit to Israel and Palestine dissolves his grad school pretensions). Mark’s future is a mystery, though on the eve of defending his thesis in Russian history, he discovers, “Ultimately these historical parallels were of limited use in figuring out your personal life.” The joke being, well, duh.

Gessen gets points for making fun of himself. Hey, intellectuals act like idiots, too! Sad? Yes. Funny? Sort of.

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