Keith Gessen, All The Sad Young Literary Men
If at first you don’t succeed, get a graduate degree.
February 3rd, 2010
Wells Tower Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned | Stories to pillage by.0 comments
January 27th, 2010
Q & A • Nick Flynn The Ticking Is The Bomb | Torture ticks him off while his daughter’s on the way.0 comments
January 20th, 2010
Elizabeth Gilbert Committed | The bother of being the bride.0 comments
January 13th, 2010
The Neverending Story | Various bits of information about the Moth.0 comments
January 6th, 2010
William Langewiesche Fly By Wire0 comments
December 30th, 2009
Matthew Flaming The Kingdom of Ohio | The secret, sordid origins of...Toledo?0 comments
December 9th, 2009
Profile: Jay Ryan | Meet the king of warm-and-fuzzy rock posters.1 comment
December 2nd, 2009
Jennifer Burns Goddess Of The Market | Ayn Rand’s prickly life.0 comments
November 18th, 2009
Paul Mccartney: A Life Peter Ames Carlin | A McCartney bio takes superfans a step beyond the Beatles.0 comments
November 11th, 2009
Tom Krattenmaker Onward Christian Athletes | Is Christianity’s monopoly in sports evangelism fair?1 comment
[April 30th, 2008]
Keith Gessen’s three characters (and perhaps the author, too) join an already overlarge generation of expensively educated, middle-aged men whose happiest period of life was college. Sociologically, it’s a sad state of affairs, and from a literary perspective, it’s well-trodden turf. But with his keen sense of bathos, Gessen nevertheless whips this familiar material into an amusing novel.
All the Sad Young Literary Men (Viking Adult, 256 pages, $24.95), Gessen’s debut, follows three Harvard graduates as they struggle with too much education and not enough purpose in literary Manhattan. During their time at university, Sam, Mark and Keith have imbibed highbrow notions about what constitutes a worthwhile life, but none has the slightest idea how to pay for it, or how to keep a girlfriend.
Trying to differentiate between them is a waste of time, as it quickly becomes apparent they are all variations on the same character, written in the same voice, with slightly different emphases. Was Keith the one who stresses about the Israeli Occupation? Or was he the one who’s obsessed with the Mensheviks? It’s irrelevant. Each character routinely rides his intellectual hobby horse; each is involved in a lengthy recovery from the breakup of an early post-college relationship; and each has a boyish affinity (!) for the exclamation mark. The fact they never meet in the novel might be “meta” or “ironic” or something. Or, practically speaking, it might be the only way the author could devise to keep them nominally separate in the reader’s mind.
It almost goes without saying that women characters exist only as foils to their cerebral male suitors—they haven’t a whiff of depth. But what’s most disappointing is the way intellectual pursuits are totally co-opted by vanity. Put another way: Yes, these characters talk a lot about Lenin, the Holocaust, the 2004 elections—but it never amounts to anything. Although each is ostensibly a public intellectual, the most significant theorizing that Keith, Mark and Sam do is to apply principles learned from the Russian Constituent Assembly to their uneventful love lives. Ultimately, thinkers like Hegel and Ulinksy serve merely as window dressing for a depressing—if witty—chronicle of how difficult it is to get pussy after Harvard.
The strength of Literary Men lies in how accurately it chronicles the modern phenomenon of the Ivy League idler. Gessen dispatches familiar highbrow pretensions—political punditry, novel-writing, groundbreaking dissertations—with devastating anticlimax. The promising young Zionist author (actually an uninformed anti-Semite) must return his prestigious advance and turn to temping. The up-and-coming liberal journalist spends the night in his car on the campus of his old high school, alone and lonely. And the grad student of Russian History? He isn’t studying in that library carrel—he’s looking at porn.
With the exception of a mawkish and unconvincing penultimate chapter, Gessen is content to leave things there, ideologically. Perhaps at one time men were different—our European ancestors, for instance, who traveled halfway across the world and forged lives in the Western Hemisphere. But these days, the wind in America blows toward the north, then turns around and blows toward the south. All is vanity. Or, as the author succinctly states, “…all the feelings one expended, received, that one felt at the core of one’s being, had turned, in the course of things, to dust.”
That kind of American fatalism is nothing new; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s All the Sad Young Men, after whom Literary Men is self-consciously titled, is a prime example. But in refusing to tamper with a tried-and-true literary pessimism—or in taking it up to begin with—Gessen, a gifted prose stylist, has missed an opportunity.
RECENT COMMENTS ON “Keith Gessen, All The Sad Young Literary Men”








