All the Sad Young Literary Men

Jun 01, 2008 Yulia rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: writers-on-writing

I was actually very embarrassed asking where I could find this book in my local Borders, because I'd forgotten the name of the author (which sounds strangely like "keep guessing") and because I find the name of the book, despite its being a Fitzgerald allusion, rather regrettable. So when Frank started reading it to me, we were both surprised and confused to find we actually liked the writing and found Gessen much more talented than his n+1 co-editor Benjamin Kunkel, who'd previously been over-h...more I was actually very embarrassed asking where I could find this book in my local Borders, because I'd forgotten the name of the author (which sounds strangely like "keep guessing") and because I find the name of the book, despite its being a Fitzgerald allusion, rather regrettable. So when Frank started reading it to me, we were both surprised and confused to find we actually liked the writing and found Gessen much more talented than his n+1 co-editor Benjamin Kunkel, who'd previously been over-hyped and proven a great disappointment (I foolishly had bought Kunkel's book, thinking it would be much discussed).

What's also unfortunate is that my brother, who attended a reading of this book, said that Gessen read aloud the passage about compulsively checking his Google ranking, which wasn't at all a representative or worthy passage to read. Why couldn't Gessen have begun at the beginning? Was he trying to appeal to a broader, more internet-oriented audience? Perhaps beginning on page 1 is too predictable?

Well, so far, I'm a third through an still very interested and not repelled by what reviewers in the press were put off by. I also found it strange one reviewer made a point of disliking how the characters in this book all attended "big name" colleges. Well, what are you supposed to do if you attended Harvard and are writing a fictionalized account of your college friends? Research SUNY-Binghamton or Queens College? Is it a crime to write about the privileged? Certainly, now I can see Gessen's affinity for Fitzgerald, if I don't in his voice.

As much as I hate Sam, the failed writer obsessed with his Google count, I love when he's on a date with Katie and it's taking forever to walk her home: "Now it was two, it was past two, and soon it would be dawn and his penis would turn into a pumpkin . . ." What an image!

But after 116 pages, it's starting to annoy me more. If these characters put more effort into their work and less into being sleazy guys, they'd get more more done and get more girls. And why must everyone in this book be an aspiring or successful writer? Is life broken down so easily for Gessen?

Some traces of Don DeLillo and Philip Roth peep in. Not necessarily a good thing. Why must everyone in the book be a firstgeneration Russian-Jew. Couldn't one be a Russian, one Jewish, and one just a random American? Two thirds of the way through, all the characters seem the same to me. Too many sweaty alcoholics in this. My guess is Gessen is a sweaty alcoholic.

Spoiler? Debatable)

Final analysis: Nothing happens in this book. People meet and break up, book deals are made and lost, lives occasionally cross, and some hair is lost, but no insight is gained, no probing questions considered. As Frank puts it, "When you lack psychological depth, you have to make mountains out of shit." Let's call this a hill of shit: a mountain is too great of an achievement. (less)

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Jan 25, 2009 Greg rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

I wanted to like this book more. Based on the five star system, I have to give it a three. In reality it's a weak three and a half stars, maybe a three point four stars.

The book is about a three (I think, I was thinking of this book about an hour after finishing it, and I was trying to think how many different main characters are there, and I had a hard time thinking if there were three or four, I'm pretty sure it's three though) sad young men. I don't know if I'd call him literary men, but as...more I wanted to like this book more. Based on the five star system, I have to give it a three. In reality it's a weak three and a half stars, maybe a three point four stars.

The book is about a three (I think, I was thinking of this book about an hour after finishing it, and I was trying to think how many different main characters are there, and I had a hard time thinking if there were three or four, I'm pretty sure it's three though) sad young men. I don't know if I'd call him literary men, but as a title it sounds better than All the Sad Young Intellectual Men or something like that. The book follows the trajectories of three men in the college/early twenties/grad school days. They are all part of that subculture of people who believe that ideas and books matter, and who are wrapped up in the world and probably even believe that long discussions about the Russian Revolution or the social theories of Focault are important things and that they aren't living in some self-imposed ghetto that is quite out of touch with the real world (me being a former full-time resident of this ghetto and still living on the fringes of it don't mean this in a totally condescending way, but when I think of a lot of the talk that passed as conversation when I was in grad school 1.0 I have to wonder what kind of world we really thought we were living in). These bright young men are also emotional cripples who see their lives passing in front of them, and dread the idea of being alone, not living up to their potential, feeling that maybe their ideas are only idealistic baggage that won't be allowed on the next connecting flight, and for the life of them feel they are old and past their prime at the ripe old ages of say mid to late twenties.

All of this is familiar territory for me, fuck I could even easily put myself into any of these people's places, but with maybe a little less ambition and a healthy dose of melancholy or depression or whatever you'd call it (something strangely absent from any of the male main characters, but present in some of the females (strange that I thought of this, since sad is in the title, and they are kind of sad, but sad in a way that doesn't seem ingrained, more just sad at the state they are in, which is different I think from having a general melancholy view of the world, does this make sense?). Just shift away the focus from history and philosophy and add some extra self doubt and I think I could be a stand in for one of these guys.

Normally a book that I can in many ways relate to so heavily would garner at least four stars. The feeling that something is being written for you, and that you 'get it' where other's might just be tourists is usually a strong motivation to really like something. And I tried to really like this quick and pretty enjoyable book. The problem I had was that all the characters (the three main story lines, or was it four?) all sounded the same. I had a hard time sometimes remembering which story line was going on since they all kind of blended into one voice. Granted only one of the main stories was told in the first person, and there were more than enough differences in the characters to tell them apart in the details, but the entire feel of all three of them was too similar. Usually at the beginning of a chapter it would take me a few pages before I realized which hapless sad young man I was reading about.

Spoiler? - Maybe not much of one. Actually not really.

My other main problem with the book was that for almost 3/4's of the book the characters had almost nothing to do with one another, they seemed like three different stories that were similar and took place in the same era but didn't come together. Then the author decided to bring them all together with some very weak ties that felt sort of like a relationship deus ex machina. I guess the three story lines needed to be brought together, but the way that it happened was kind of contrived. I love books where disparate story lines are able to be brought together, and most of my favorite books use this technique, say something like Magnetic Field(s) or anything by Richard Powers, but in those cases it doesn't feel like the author had written a few different stories and now needs to put them together and call them a novel.

I guess in the end I enjoyed the book, but I think it needed to be developed more both in it's voice and in the overall structure. On the plus side it's use of the history of Communism as a device to show the failings in the characters' lives was a nice touch. Oh, and from the beginning of the review, my objection to the title. None of the characters seem especially literary as opposed to being very historical and political. But I'm just splitting hairs there. (less)

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Jun 18, 2008 Dan rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book violates pretty much every principle you learned in writing school; it's about hypereducated twentysomethings who don't seem to have jobs or fixed locations, and who primarily engage in speculation about what might have happened between them and their ex-girlfriends. That's not what fiction is about. As we all know, fiction is about characters with cleanly-defined wants pursuing unified actions, just like we all have/do in real life. Fiction is also never about the kind of people who w...more

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May 16, 2008 Casey rated it 4 of 5 stars

I saw Gessen give a reading here in Seattle, and something he said sort of provided the lens through which I interpreted this book. He basically said that our social class - white urban educated people - have decided that we are not worthy of documenting. That in academia, we study Africa or extreme poverty or reinterpretations of everything. And that in literature, we write about World War II or immigrants or foreign countries. And that this has also led us to stop identifying ourselves as a so...more I saw Gessen give a reading here in Seattle, and something he said sort of provided the lens through which I interpreted this book. He basically said that our social class - white urban educated people - have decided that we are not worthy of documenting. That in academia, we study Africa or extreme poverty or reinterpretations of everything. And that in literature, we write about World War II or immigrants or foreign countries. And that this has also led us to stop identifying ourselves as a social group - and not just a social group, but one of extreme importance, as it is the group making a large portion of decisions about how our country is run. Gessen punctuated this idea by saying that in modern-day Russia, this social group has already completely abandoned any idea of their collective identity, and this has led to what is essentially facism there now. Without a cohesive inteligensia, those most able to develop and distribute words of dissent and critique of the status quo aren't able to - they lack a network to exchange ideas, the strength in numbers necessary to produce dissent in the face of opposition, and the belief that their lifestyle is worth defending. They're too focused on studying/documenting/saving everyone else to save themselves.

Ok, he didn't say all of that, but he said much of that, and I extrapolated the rest. Either way, I read his book as a documentation of me and my friends and what our lives were like - something that, to back up his claim, I very rarely do. And it succeeded tremendously.

Some of the most increasingly significant aspects of our lives - e-mail, porn, graduate school, living in poverty in big cities, drinking copious amounts, dating and dating and dating - are all dealt with here, seriously but with humor, documenting the harm they all cause but with compassion.

Gessen also writes well, and in a way I'm not used to people of my generation writing. The Eggers/Safran-Foer's of the world like to show that they have such a command of language, they simply can't be constrained by convention, and strive to prove over and over how unqiue and special and comical and irreverent their spectacular intelligence allows them to be. Which often results in cutesy wankfests.

So thanks to Gessen for writing honestly and well, for writing about the people he's writing about, and for not being vaguely embarassed about being a well-educated white urbanite. (less)

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May 23, 2008 Rifftrafft rated it 4 of 5 stars

as somebody who didn't get any work whatsoever until i changed my email address from post.harvard.edu to gmail.com, who can vouch for the knot of humility and vanity and realness and self-mythology and narrow-minded outsider resentment and self-loathing one can find himself in upon graduation--ultra records wouldn't even hire me, ultra fucking records!--i am riding hard for this book. one of the best articulations of this very real problem i know i went through at school, and which i know others...more

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Oct 23, 2010 Lee rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book -- expectations for this book weren't so high thanks to so many low-star reviews on here. But, hey, it exceeded expectations. This book -- it's not a novel or a collection of linked stories. It's autofiction in which a consistent authorial presence presents itself in three barely characterized characters, each with more similiarities than differences, each with girlfriends differentiated mostly by their names (this surely intentional undercharacterization interestingly blurs the edges...more This book -- expectations for this book weren't so high thanks to so many low-star reviews on here. But, hey, it exceeded expectations. This book -- it's not a novel or a collection of linked stories. It's autofiction in which a consistent authorial presence presents itself in three barely characterized characters, each with more similiarities than differences, each with girlfriends differentiated mostly by their names (this surely intentional undercharacterization interestingly blurs the edges between author, characters, and -- most importantly -- sad young literary readers, women and men alike). The chapter called "Isaac Babel" -- about a young writer's encounters with an older writer and a sense of the young writer's inevitable assumption of the older writer's role -- this chapter is excellent, five stars, maybe up there with "Guy de Maupassant," a Babel story referenced in the chapter. Toward the end, a chapter set in the West Bank dropped this one down to three stars for me -- I skimmed it a little. But mainly I liked reading about my demographic: eg, bits about dreams/aspirations, girlfriends and ex-girlfriends, gyms, youthful self-comparisons with major past achievers, old cars, old friends marrying and making more and more money as one scrimps solo after graduate school, online and old-fashioned dating, and the sense of being too old before one's even anywhere near old. Was charmed by a classy old-school "Fitzgeraldian spirit" syntax tic -- a tic involving em dashes and repetitions, exactly like this sentence. Charmed also by the juxtaposition of Lenin et al. and the Russian Revolution etc with the characters and their situations. Disregard all reviews on here that compare this to Franzen or DeLillo or that say this book lacks ideas -- those reviewers didn't really read the book (and/or haven't read DeLillo or Franzen). There's not much plot, but there are tons of ideas and insights and asides, consistently rendered with intelligence and charm. In a somehow non-nauseating way, it's like chick lit for the n + 1 set. The title probably should have been "All the Sad Young Male Political Journalists," but that's not a catchy enough play on the early Fitzgerald story collection. Anyway, this book -- this book's certainly a good read for sad young -- and young-ish -- literary men (and, sadly perhaps, for them and them only, most likely). 3+ stars, rounded up because I'd like to see more books that feel real like this.(less)

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Jun 10, 2008 Emily rated it 2 of 5 stars

Ha ha ha ha ha. No.

Where to even begin? Sure, there were some funny lines, particularly in the "His Google" chapter, but for the most part this book is terribly flawed. Since Gessen isn't above using charts and bulleted lists in his book, I won't refrain from using them here.

This book:

1. has a complicated relationship with irony. Late in the book, the narrator describes one character's inability to understand what another character is saying. "His English was good but it was not good enough to...more Ha ha ha ha ha. No.

Where to even begin? Sure, there were some funny lines, particularly in the "His Google" chapter, but for the most part this book is terribly flawed. Since Gessen isn't above using charts and bulleted lists in his book, I won't refrain from using them here.

This book:

1. has a complicated relationship with irony. Late in the book, the narrator describes one character's inability to understand what another character is saying. "His English was good but it was not good enough to detect when Sam was kidding, or half kidding, or maybe a quarter kidding, if at all--in fact very few people's English was that good, which may have indicated a problem less with their English than with Sam." The same could be said of the author's writing. Are we supposed to have sympathy for his characters, these unhappy narcissists who trudge through their 20s fighting off Humility? We can't know, because Gessen doesn't make an effort to render these characters real. The three voices are indistinguishable. But oh! Is their similarity Gessen's attempt at illustrating something about our generation? You, the reader, must simply decide whether or not to give him the benefit of the doubt.

2. attempts to address the political in a gimmicky and unsatisfying way (not unlike another n+1 editor). On page 211, one character muses, "Ultimately these historical parallels were of limited use in figuring out your personal life." Indeed! And while surely it was entertaining enough for the writer to invent characters who compared their lives to historical events, the jokes got lost in the delivery.

3. serves up particularly flawed female characters. On page 40, in reference to a line of partially italicized dialogue from one female character, the narrator writes: "All the women in Sam's life italicized things." Yes, and they must, because without their italics, the female characters are so flat that their motivations and intonations are indiscernible. With a few exceptions (explained in exposition, natch), the lithe, gorgeous ladies who populate ASYLM exist either (a) to merely laugh at jokes and flatter, in which case they are quickly trampled because the men become bored, or (b) to shame the men into impotency by being too intelligent or too beautiful.

4. is just plain old poorly written, due to jarring shifts in POV, misplaced clauses, and transitions that are not at all supported by plot or character.

The book gets two stars because it does have one very redeeming quality: Gessen has created a very accurate portrait of an era. The Age of Hubris.
(less)

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Aug 20, 2008 Nathan Rostron rated it 3 of 5 stars

The biggest disappointment about this book is not the obvious fact that Gessen could just barely fictionalize three different aspects of himself (obsessive Jew, obsessive Russophile, obsessive politically minded do-gooder smart person) and pass them off as distinct characters, but rather that the novel--about extremely ambitious yet frustrated and self-defeating people--is itself so unambitious. At about 250 pages and with a weird skinny trim size, it's well written but not daring or adventurous...more

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Feb 03, 2009 Patrick rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 20th-century-to-present-american, on-shelf

There is a lot I can understand one complaining about in this book: the multiple narrators can at times make the book unnecessarily cluttered, the politics could be considered simplistic, etc. However, what makes this book most notable to me is that it is the first I have ever read that accurately portrays how ingrained the internet now is in society. As a result, it accurately portrays, to me, modern culture in a way that no other book I have read does. I would guess that this is a result large...more

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Nov 28, 2008 alli rated it 1 of 5 stars Recommends it for: no one, ever

Gessen clearly illustrates everything wrong with his generation of writers: an awkward desire to be vicious, but without the skill or introspection to do any real damage. It's like saying "You're an unmotivated loser for living in your parents basement. I'll be by Friday for dinner. Your mom knows I'm vegan, right?"

Also, all the lady characters are underdeveloped and horribly irritating.

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Aug 31, 2010 Grace rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: new-york-books

I bought this book because I wanted to read some contemporary fiction, rather than the classics I usually pick up. It had a good cover. And it didn't have "a moment that would change their lives forever", as just about every contemporary novel seems to have, and which I think is a ridiculous idea.

I didn't expect to like it very much. But I did. I liked it a LOT.

All the Sad Young Literary Men really captured a sort of lifestyle. It started in a promising way, as the lives of the characters' did,...more

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Oct 01, 2008 Abby rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Nerdz

Recommended to Abby by: The Library Shelf.

When I went to the library to rent All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, it wasn't there, and I had to get on the wait list, so I picked All the Sad Young Literary Men up off the "new fiction" shelf because:
a) The title began with the same word.
b) Gawker hates Keith Gessen.
c) I knew some sad young literary men in my days as a sad young literary lady. I guess I still know some now, but they aren't so pathetic, these ones.
d) My brother went to Harvard and was miserable. I had a feeling that the ta...more

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Sep 15, 2008 Kristopher Jansma rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: bookblog

Another summer reading recommendation from my boss, he billed this one as "literary candy," a description that I whole-heartedly repeat to you all. The strangely-titled book (reference to Fitzgerald, yet again!) follows a group of Harvard students who are swiftly cast out into the real world full of ideas and passion and nonsensical senses of self worth. Gessen does a good job of making these guys lovable, even as you realize that you'd probably hate any one of them if you overheard them bloviat...more Another summer reading recommendation from my boss, he billed this one as "literary candy," a description that I whole-heartedly repeat to you all. The strangely-titled book (reference to Fitzgerald, yet again!) follows a group of Harvard students who are swiftly cast out into the real world full of ideas and passion and nonsensical senses of self worth. Gessen does a good job of making these guys lovable, even as you realize that you'd probably hate any one of them if you overheard them bloviating in a Williamsburg bar somewhere. Gessen, an editor of the literary magazine "n+1" knows the hipster culture and he knows that people love to hate them because they so intensely love themselves, but at the same time we're entranced the moment they offer to let us into their strange, solipsistic little worlds.
It helps that all of these guys seem to have good hearts, and they wear them on their sleeves. The book is ultimately more of a collection of love stories than anything else - each of the sad, young literary men are profoundly perplexed by the fairer sex - in a way that reminded me happily of the naive loves in Fitzgerald's best stories (Ice Palace, May Day, Babylon Revisited). He also manages to thematically tie these romances into the intellectual struggles of the men. One of my favorite characters is a Jewish academic who gained himself a reputation as the future author of a Great Modern Zionist Epic before he's even ever heard of Leon Uris or Exodus. His problem is that he does not really understand Israel or the Palestinians at all, so whenever he begins arguing for Israel, he swiftly winds up conceding Eastern Jerusalem. But the best part of this story is the way Gessen mirrors the intellectual issues with the romantic ones. The character is likewise torn between two women, whom he emails frequently, even as he goes to Israel at long last to decide once and for all how he feels about the conflict (and the women).
Gessen also seamlessly incorporates a very modern, tech-savvy world for these young intellectuals, who may simultaneously have their heads stuck in Marxist tracts. One character is worried about the shrinking "size of his Google" (how many hits come up when he searches for his own name). He also keeps us rooted firmly in the new century by referencing the world politics of the past decade. In one memorable scene a character proposes to his girlfriend as Al Gore is named President. She accepts, feeling hope for the future, but then calls off the engagement as the Recount begins and Bush steps into power. The book is incredibly clever in moments like these.
Unfortunately it isn't always so clever or lively. Some of the characters fall very flat in comparison to others - in particular the one who speaks in the first person and seems to be a stand-in for Gessen himself. The book is told in chapters that alternate between the characters, so when you're away from a good one and in a bad one, it can feel irrelevant and tedious. Though there are overlaps, the book also never allows these main characters to reunite, and I found myself wishing for some scene where all these sad, young, literary men would come together at some Fitzgerald convention in Park Slope, where they'd tell stories of their loves and their wars.(less)

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Oct 05, 2008 Stephen rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary-fiction

This is not a bad book. I thought it offered a fairly convincing depiction of what I observe around me most days here in the subways, parks, and especially cafés of Brooklyn, USA. But that's the problem: I would never imagine writing a novel of potential mild interest to so few. The audience that might actually find this book a good, even compelling read, may perhaps only be found in a few forward-thinking but sleepy literary outposts like Trondheim or Aarhus (and I may well be doing these Nordi...more

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Jul 24, 2008 margaret rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: sad young literary men?

I just read Gessen's book and would like to review it with
reasons why my friend Kyle Beachy's debut fiction The Slide:A Novel about pre-9-11 confused college grads is better than Keith Gessen's

1. More colors in the cover.

Anyone can do black and white. Having recently ordered all my books in color order, I have to say there are way too many black and white books. Plus instead of a creepy literary Atlas, we have a flying van.

2. The Slide is a far superior title.

That seems obvious

3. St. Louis is...more

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May 22, 2008 Sarah rated it 3 of 5 stars

I just finished. And sure, I'm still crushing on Keith Gessen pretty hard (this review is for all of you who have suffered through my ecstatic fawning over him these last few days...), but I'm also feeling ambivalent about the book itself.

It seems like a prolonged attempt at reconciling citizenship with sexuality, as though the two things were distinct, and as though each one could justify the ugliness and infelicities of the other. Maybe this picture of that struggle is true (i.e., to life). I...more I just finished. And sure, I'm still crushing on Keith Gessen pretty hard (this review is for all of you who have suffered through my ecstatic fawning over him these last few days...), but I'm also feeling ambivalent about the book itself.

It seems like a prolonged attempt at reconciling citizenship with sexuality, as though the two things were distinct, and as though each one could justify the ugliness and infelicities of the other. Maybe this picture of that struggle is true (i.e., to life). I don't know.
But, in the book, the phenomenon is a little whiplashing: turn to world politics, turn swiftly to romance, back to politics, back to romance. There are many, many analogies made between the two worlds, but they never really interpenetrate. And maybe this is just descriptive of the feeling of being a historical/political citizen at the same time as being a libidinous, sexualized dude, but (don't you agree?) it's gotta be edifying (not to say prescriptive), somehow, too. This book isn't really edifying. It says, finally: the world is wicked hard, but let's get pregnant anyway!...to fight the forces of evil. Or, hey, maybe it's a book that calls for gendered readings--instructive for the men, not so much for the women...? And that reminds me.

It also feels like Gessen trifurcated himself into 3 not-very-easy-to-distinguish men characters so that, in the course of one book, he could flirt with more women. Suspect. I will give him this much, however: the guy can write an engaging contemporary late-twenties romance. He uses dirty tricks, no mistake, but they work! (Hence my crush.) Example: the part about kissing women's throats is enough, almost, to justify the whole costly, cloth-bound project. Curiously, Gessen's women end up being more interesting than his men (by a long margin), but only as a result of being universally mystified. He plunks the women on pedestals of marbleized beauty, efficacy (sexual and professional), and morality. He reduces them--charmingly but also irritatingly--to objects of love. As if we needed any more of that nonsense. Oy.

In sum, should you read this book? Yeah, of course. It's fun. Besides, chums, I want someone to commiserate with me about the sad (familiar) plight of Celeste. So, get on it! (Call me. I'll lend it to you.)(less)

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May 05, 2008 Bill rated it 5 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this book, Gessen's first. It definitely wasn't perfect, despite my 5 star rating, but overall I thought that it was excellent. It is a great portrayal of your 20s as an upper middle class male intellectual (note that since I more or less belong to that class this book may have resounded with me more than others, fair warning.) The writing was mostly great, with some truly standout lines.

The story itself follows 3 main characters through college and post-college lives, mostly f...more

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Feb 05, 2009 Bookmarks Magazine added it

Critics generally reacted positively to Gessen's debut novel (really a set of linked short stories) and agreed that few writers have explored the hopes and fears of the young, urban intelligentsia with equal wit and precision. However, as the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram review claims, one's affection for the novel seems to depend on one's ability to stomach Gessen's narcissistic and self-absorbed protagonists

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Mar 26, 2013 Jen rated it 2 of 5 stars

It’s honestly a bit difficult for me to decide whether I even liked this book. I liked the characters in it, and I was certainly highly entertained by particular passages. But there’s an awful lot in this book that’s outside of the characters or plot, mainly discussion of the history of the Russian Revolution and a lot of Israel vs. Palestine debate, and even when these topics are examined through the point of view of the characters, it still seems like these issues are discussed in needless det...more

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Jun 29, 2012 ba rated it 4 of 5 stars

Before reading this book, I did not know that I had already suspected that there were three distinct archetypes of east-coast stereotypically-Jewish overly-educated wannabe writers. But now I know that I did (and that there are). There seems to be a sub-genre in most popular art forms that centers around examination of nervous Jews in their natural habitat. I won't speculate as to why that is (cough-wecontrolthemedia-cough), but that's usually not enough for me. In this case the merits of the bo...more

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Jul 27, 2011 Megan rated it 1 of 5 stars

This book was beyond terrible. I'm truly sorry I bought it, and if I could get my money back in some way, I would. It's incredibly pretentious, but not even in a way where I have to at least grudgingly admit that it's well-written, or funny, or intelligent, or insightful... because this book is none of those things. So on top of NOT being the least bit smart or funny or insightful it's painfully pretentious. It's also banal and flat-out boring. The characters in this book are the same annoying g...more

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Nov 30, 2010 Jennifer rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

This book is one of my favourites. It captures the swirling, nonsensical decision making process of people in their mid-twenties, struggling with the choices that they are being forced to make about growing up, doing the right thing, and being good partners. It is about identity and growth. It is about failure and guilt. It is about looking inside yourself and realizing that you aren't the person you expected to be.

The women in this book struck me as well. None of them are major characters but...more

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Dec 06, 2009 Charles Matthews rated it 3 of 5 stars

The Germans have a word for it: Bildungsroman. Roman means “novel,” and Bildung is, well, “education” and “development” and “formation” and a lot of other stuff all packed into one word. A Bildungsroman is a more-or-less-veiled autobiographical novel about a young person’s coming of age. Charles Dickens wrote two of them, Great Expectations and David Copperfield. George Eliot’s was The Mill on the Floss, D.H. Lawrence’s was Sons and Lovers, Thomas Wolfe’s was Look Homeward, Angel, and F. Scott F...more The Germans have a word for it: Bildungsroman. Roman means “novel,” and Bildung is, well, “education” and “development” and “formation” and a lot of other stuff all packed into one word. A Bildungsroman is a more-or-less-veiled autobiographical novel about a young person’s coming of age. Charles Dickens wrote two of them, Great Expectations and David Copperfield. George Eliot’s was The Mill on the Floss, D.H. Lawrence’s was Sons and Lovers, Thomas Wolfe’s was Look Homeward, Angel, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s was This Side of Paradise.

And All the Sad Young Literary Men is Keith Gessen’s. Its publication has caused a mild stir among the book world’s chatterati, because Gessen is, to go German again, a Wunderkind of the literary scene. Just 33, he is the founder and editor of a much-talked-about literary journal, n+1, and a critic who has been harsh on writers whom he finds wanting, such as Ian McEwan and Jonathan Safran Foer. He’s also involved in a long-running feud with his West Coast rival, Dave Eggers, the founder of McSweeney’s.

But you don’t need to be a devotee of lit chat to read his novel. The sad young literary men of the title are named Mark, Keith and Sam, and their stories, which connect only tangentially, are told in separate chapters, rotating through the book. All three are aspects of the author. Keith is the most obvious one, because he not only shares the author’s name and his Russian origins – Gessen was born in Moscow and came to the States when he was 6 years old – but he also narrates his sections of the book in first person. But Sam, like the author, lives in Brooklyn and went to Harvard, and Mark is a graduate student in history at Syracuse University, where Gessen got an M.F.A. in the writing program.

We meet Mark first, living with Sasha, whom he met in Moscow while doing research. It’s 1998 and they live in arty poverty in Queens: “To be poor in New York was humiliating, a little, but to be young – to be young was divine.” But time passes and Sasha leaves, and Mark sinks into the ennui of writing a dissertation on one of the lesser Mensheviks. He has dalliances with various women toward whom he takes a characteristically intellectual approach. He “had spent his twenties, even that portion of his twenties that he spent married, preoccupied with the problem of sex. He considered it in the positivist tradition of how to find it, of course, but also, and more significant, in the interpretivist or postmodernist tradition of how to think about it, how to ponder it historically, how to discourse about and critique it.” Sex in the head, D.H. Lawrence called it.

Sam comes out of Harvard planning to write “the great Zionist epic,” undeterred by the fact that he’s never been to Israel and doesn’t read Hebrew: When he tried to learn the language, “the letters looked like Tetris pieces.” When he gets a book contract, he develops writer’s block – he even stops “writing the occasional online opinion piece about the Second Intifada.” And to his dismay, that causes his presence on Google, evidence of his existence, to decline. He calls up Google to plead with someone to “up my count a little until I get back on my feet.” Eventually, Sam will get it together and go to Israel, where reality will set his life on a different course.

Keith’s story begins in a no less disillusioning manner: an encounter on the street with Lauren, his Harvard roommate’s former girlfriend, and her father, “the former Vice President” who “wore his beard, his infamous beard” – i.e., the one Al Gore grew after losing the election of 2000, though none of Gore’s daughters is called Lauren. Keith, who is “hurt” by Lauren’s failure to introduce him to her father, has a burgeoning career as a lefty literary intellectual at the beginning of a post-literary era dominated by a right-wing administration with a discernible bias against any intellectuals other than the ones who contribute to the Weekly Standard. The times -- for Keith and Sam and Mark -- are out of joint.

It’s possible to dismiss this novel as another fine whine from another elitist writer. And by invoking with his title Fitzgerald’s story collection All the Sad Young Men and by inviting the parallel of Gessen’s Harvard to the Princeton that was the backdrop for Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, Gessen is displaying brazen chutzpah. Mark and Sam and Keith are not in themselves as interesting as he seems to think they are, and he hasn’t put enough imagination into creating secondary characters who might serve as foils to them. As characters, the women in the book are evanescent, even though they are a central concern … no, obsession of the three protagonists.

But there is wit at work in the novel, and as a document of the times, as a reflection of the alienation of young American intellectuals in the first decade of the 21st century, All the Sad Young Literary Men may be the kind of book that people will pick up years from now – just as we pick up Fitzgerald’s chronicles of the Jazz Age, or books by Britain’s Angry Young Men of the 1950s -- and say, “Oh, that’s what it must have been like.”
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Sep 28, 2009 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars

Another book that, for me at least, is best enjoyed if you let it dictate the terms of what you get out of it (like Unferth's, or Galchen's novels). The stories that are told here, of three Harvard grads with similar literary-political ambitions who tumble through a decade or so (from ca. 98-08) are full of rich observations, some seriously sustained grad school critique of culture material, and often some pretty bracing humor and funny literary asides-- you really could play "spot the model," e...more

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Feb 24, 2011 Mike rated it 4 of 5 stars

Someone I follow on Twitter posted a link to someone else’s blog where the author was providing book recommendations for anyone and everyone who commented based on the last five books each person had read. It was an incredible performance—over one hundred people commented, and each recommendation provided was unique and something the guy had read. Intrigued and impressed, I posted my last five and received Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men as a recommendation.

It’s pretty good. There...more Someone I follow on Twitter posted a link to someone else’s blog where the author was providing book recommendations for anyone and everyone who commented based on the last five books each person had read. It was an incredible performance—over one hundred people commented, and each recommendation provided was unique and something the guy had read. Intrigued and impressed, I posted my last five and received Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men as a recommendation.

It’s pretty good. There were several moments that I greatly enjoyed, but there were also parts that really frustrated me, and even some things that I simply did not understand. The book reminds me of the Milan Kundera books I’ve read (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being) in that they are located at the intersection of character/identity, love/relationships, and politics. In ATSYLM, these issues are all equally important and interrelated for the three characters we follow. This was part of what I did not understand; there’s a lot in this book about early 20th Century Russian politics (the Bolsheviks) and the Israel/Palestine conflict in the 1990s and 2000s—neither of which I can even pretend to know anything about. I tried to take it in stride and just pick up what I could, but I felt like I was missing out on something important. I studied Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in a college course and the political background was quite significant to the novel. I don’t think it’s as critical in Gessen’s novel, but it certainly plays a large role.

There are nine chapters in ATSYLM, each focused on one of three characters—Keith, Sam, or Mark. In a way, the book almost feels more like a collection of short stories, especially in the way each chapter ends. They have that somewhat unresolved ending that I always feel when reading a short story; you get a portrait of a character and not much more—no grand, sweeping, tie-it-all-up conclusions or anything like that. These three characters are quite similar—most notably in how outrageously earnest they all are. At times I found I could relate—some of the depictions of college life and expectations and girls and stuff were spot on—but these guys’ seriousness occasionally became annoying. It reminded me a bit of the movie Metropolitan, though less… not “whimsical”… I guess I’ll say “happy.” There is a feeling of inevitability in ATSYLM; the characters seem doomed to be melancholy. If they’d just chill out for a second and just take things as they come and not think too much!!! I saw a lot of collegiate Mike Knepper in this book, and I’m really glad to say that I feel like I don’t relate to Keith, Sam, and Mark quite as strongly now as I would have a year or two ago.

So, I mostly enjoyed the book but occasionally got frustrated with it. This book is first and foremost interested in and concerned about character, from which I personally feel a bit detached. I think that many readers will find Gessen’s observations about people—not only the three sad young literary men but also their roommates and girlfriends and others—quite insightful, accurate, and enjoyable, if you’re into those kinds of observations. I myself have always been a little confused by character sketches—in books but also and more often in real life. My friends will tell me stories about other people and describe individuals in various ways, and I really have a tough time grasping the descriptions and forming a picture or idea of this person, whereas others I know can connect and understand what the storyteller is trying to get at right away. I guess I have a hard time placing people into “types.” I’ve thought about this issue quite a bit; I wonder what it says about me individually and socially. And, how would someone describe me when relating a story to a different group of people? “This kid Mike Knepper, he’s the kind of guy who…” I’m not really worried or concerned about how other people present me or generalize me. I’m just somewhat curious, because I have a hard time making those kinds of statements about people myself, or understanding them about others when they are told to me. Anyways, I’m rambling now.(less)

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Jan 07, 2009 Stop added it

Shelves: reviewed

Read the STOP SMILING Two Takes reviews of All the Sad Young Literary Men:

Reviewer Genevieve Smith writes:

"Best known for skewering criticism, Gessen applies the same wit and precision to his book, but those talents might not convince the most sympathetic readers to spend 256 pages revisiting a fictional version of their younger selves behaving badly."

And John Davidson agrees, in part:

"There are first books from authors you never expect to hear from again, and then there are others that you read...more

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May 26, 2009 Rob rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This entertaining trawl through the whys and wherefores of modern America explores a number of interesting themes. Above all, I was left with the feeling that the individual is everything – almost any situation is filtered through the personal feelings of the main character and relationships dominate all – overshadowing any number of possibly more important topics: the outrages of the Bush administration, intellectual study, even a visit to the Palestinian territories. Such self-centredness lead...more

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Feb 12, 2011 Julie Ehlers rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: No one

Ugh. I got about 50 pages into this book and realized I didn't care about any of the characters at all. In fact, I found them all totally insufferable. If it had been an ordinary day, I would've pretty much abandoned the book right then. But I was on jury duty, sitting in an uncomfortable chair in City Hall, with no clear end to the day and no other books with me. So I kept on. Eventually, at about the 150 page mark, I began to care about the characters a little. After jury duty ended, I decided...more

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Jul 09, 2012 Elizabeth rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012

I'm probably being hard on this novel and would have liked it more if it had been published sooner and/or I had read it a few years earlier. Nonetheless, I think it is fair to critique Gessen for retreading territory more skillfully occupied by his peers -- most especially by Benjamin Kunkel's thematically similar Indecision (it was also unsettling how much the first few pages seemed tonally identical to Joshua Ferris). While Kunkel's effort felt all of a piece, Gessen's seems disjointed. And, w...more

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Dec 11, 2010 Bill rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book was an oddly appropriate read. I am a few months from 30, a year and a half removed from my master's degree in literature, and currently unemployed. If only I had an obsession with the Jews or Jewish women and lived on the east coast, I could have been a character in this book. Yes, I again have to find myself having to get past the fact that it's such an east coast novel (everything is NYC this and Boston that), but this time it was a little more worth it because I feel the sense of a...more

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