PositivePop MattersKeith’s narrative is the only one told through the first person. Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps because he is intended to be taken for -- or confused with -- the novel’s Harvard-educated author (who shares not only Keith’s surname, but his Russian birth), the sections that deal with Keith are the least caustic and both benefit and suffer from the subtlety of the emotions Gessen attempts to evoke ... Mark and Sam’s chapters, on the other hand, have fewer such moments of perceptive earnestness, but more than make up for them with their hard-edged, often hilarious, irony ... Gessen’s tenderness for the youth of his protagonists yields the occasional embarrassingly earnest moment, but more often than not, he strikes a rewarding balance between irony and nostalgia.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
