Of the three young men, Keith is both the most immediate, framing the episodic novel with his affably intimate first-person narrations, and the least clear ... This Keith is a vortex of thoughts, an optic nerve of observations, a summary or catalog rather more than a vividly realized character ... Beginning with its risky yet playful title, All the Sad Young Literary Men is a rueful, undramatic, mordantly funny, and frequently poignant sequence of sketch-like stories loosely organized by chronology and place and the prevailing theme of youthful literary ideals vis-à-vis literary accomplishment ... The predicament of Gessen’s characters, as it is likely to be the preeminent predicament of Gessen’s generation, is the disparity between what one has learned of history and the possibilities of making use of that knowledge in one’s life ... Gessen has captured perfectly the narcissistic ennui of privileged youth for whom self-flagellation is an art form.
The sad young literary men are always coming up with grandiose metaphors to help them think about their lives, but the metaphors they choose are always on the verge of collapse. Only at the end of the novel do the sad young literary men recognise that metaphors are of 'limited use in figuring out your personal life' ... There is lots of seepage of tone and mood between the stories, which can make the three men seem indistinguishable. They share the same idiom, a sort of sentimental sighing over women, which makes the novel disorientating, not to say nauseating, to read ... It is understood that the sadness of Gessen’s protagonists comes from being sensitive men of letters in a cruel world, but they are sad, too, in the sobering sense of uncool. One of the things the novel is interested in is rescuing intellectual solemnity from nerdiness, which partly explains all three boys’ love of grand metaphors that aim to bring poles together.
Self-pitying, self-obsessed, and itchy for recognition, these young men fall in and out of love with the same handful of women, though they themselves are barely acquainted. They shed their outsized ambitions. They acquire new ones. They fail. They become wiser, if not necessarily kinder ... One of the pleasures of Gessen’s novel is how well he reproduces the speech patterns of brainy, left-wing Ivy Leaguers—their sardonic deployment of social-theoretical jargon, their riffs on technology and capitalism, their anxiety about status, and the pride in small failures meant to refute their guilty sense of privilege ... Don’t let the smug undertone alienate you overmuch, though. Gessen earns it, more or less. He is, in fact, a very good satirist. He skewers with glee, like a latter-day Mary McCarthy.
The ambition of young literary Americans is a kind of trench warfare, and Gessen, an editor of the magazine n+1, proves himself not only a capable observer but a natural novelist with a warm gun ... Readers who find the three main characters irritating will only be obeying one of the narrative’s central commands, but Gessen manages several moral turnarounds, and before long the highly subjective manners of the novel begin to nurture a sense of political understanding ... The three men are attached to one another through slightly too faceless girls and slightly too famous universities, but Gessen makes no drama of the correspondences and we assume a certain communion between the men only via their identical language and their similar crises ... Complications abound, and some of them are the book’s fault, but Gessen’s style is good-natured and ripe enough to allow a satisfying sweetness to exist in these characters as they journey around the carnival of their own selfishness.
Gessen is reminiscent of another serious young hotshot from this side of the pond, Adam Thirlwell. Their prose is laden with bathetic jokes, harrying narrative interjections and exclamation marks. There is a faux-naive quality to their narrative tone ... Both remain, at this stage, proponents of genre fiction, what, for all Gessen's careful sociopolitical placement, we might call literary lad-lit. It is no bad thing for a first-time novelist to write about what he knows. Now that Gessen has, enjoyably, got this out of his system, perhaps we can expect a follow-up with a little more gravitas. He has the potential to be very good indeed.
People who enjoy seeing disappointment and selfishness raised to a kind of romantic sublime will not be disappointed. This is an excellent first novel that knows exactly how to nudge a character close to the edge of the reader's tolerance, without ever letting them lose their charm and interest ... Gessen knows how to use restraint, too. The three sort-of-heroes each get their own, long chapters, and these never intersect ... This careful integration of the serious and comic sets the book apart from, say, the novels of Jonathan Safran Foer, with which it otherwise shares a certain tone of intellectual self-indulgence.
It's hard to tell whether the three protagonists of All The Sad Young Literary Men are separate personalities, or just three installments of the same guy. If all these mad mopes weren't so interchangeable, Keith Gessen's vacant bildungsroman might be able to justify the way its characters continually alienate other people (including their readers), under the guise that they really don't know themselves ... They wouldn't have to be likeable if they were interesting; instead, while Gessen can turn a neat phrase, his protagonists aren't people who tempt readers to linger in their presence. Their pretensions override their humorous foibles, and the pity potentially inspired by their myopia becomes irritation, particularly at the frustratingly open ending, which manages to be simultaneously unrealistic and predictable. If it's truly this unbearable to be sad, young, and literary, this next great American whine isn't the cure.
Keith’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.
A debut novel from Russian-born translator Gessen that skewers the literary and romantic ambitions of three well-educated, tightly wound young men ... This black-comedy-in-stories alternates among three protagonists, Mark, Sam and Keith, who have little contact with one another but who have in common age, bafflement and hunger for literary fame ... Gessen strikes a marvelous balance between pitilessness and affection toward these young men, and manages the impressive feat of being simultaneously savage and tender ... A fiercely intelligent, darkly funny first novel.
Less a novel than a series of loosely connected vignettes, the humor supposedly derives from the arch disconnect between the great historic events these three characters contemplate and the petty failures of their literary and romantic strivings. But it is difficult to differentiate—and thus to care about—the three developmentally arrested protagonists who, very late in the novel, take baby steps toward manhood. There's plenty of irony on tap and more than a few cutting lines, but the callow cast and listless narrative limit the book's potential.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
