All the Sad Young Literary Men is the first novel by Keith Gessen, co-founder of the highly (and perhaps wrongly) esteemed magazine of cultural criticism, n+1, and what a self-consciously first first novel it is. The plot concerns three, um, sad young literary men and their journey from college to early adult success or failure, charting the rise and fall and rise again of all of their illusions about worldly success, political or academic or artistic achievement and, most importantly, love, sex and romance.
First, we have Keith, the only young man to tell his tale in the first person, and in an especially ingenuous, lyrical and winning voice. I suppose–I hope–this represents some kind of irony, but even so, it hardly seems necessary. Keith is the Harvard-educated outsider, child of Russian Jewish immigrants, strong believers in the American dream, and he finds in his negotiation of the American elite, both at school and later in the literary-political world, that even those at the top are scored and scarred by loneliness, shallowness and bitterness.
Next we have Sam, straining—and how laboriously, with a generous advance from a New York publisher–to write the Great Zionist Novel, though one unlike Leon Uris. But Sam too has love troubles: he’s dating two women, Arielle—who later dates Keith—and a fiery Israeli named Talia. Eventually, his inspiration and his advance both dry up (along with, in an unconvincing portrait of pomo obsession seemingly underwritten by Don DeLillo, the number of websites a Google search of his name turns up). He makes his way to Jenin shortly after the violence there, struggling to find out for himself what the reality of Zionism is. This after Gessen depicts Sam’s relationship with a shameful caricature of Chomsky, a Professor Lomaski who
was originally a seismologist who’d made a few groundbreaking [seismologist—groundbreaking? is this supposed to be funny?] discoveries in his late twenties before moving on to the comparatively glorious task of protesting American involvement in Vietnam, and then the significantly less glorious task of protesting involvement everywhere else.
Aren’t we young literary men clever, not to say smug? Anyway, in the company of several Palestinians in Jenin, as well as some “useful idiots” from Sweden, Sam eventually disapproves of a suicide bombing, discovers that young Palestinians like to pick up girls on the internet (thus reminding me of Saul Bellow lamenting perceived African-American sexual looseness, while marrying five times himself!) and gets chased by an Israeli tank. His conclusion? After Orwell, though not without some loss of profundity in the paraphrase, he resolves: “The Palestinians were idiots. But the Israelis—well, the Israelis were fuckers. And when Sam saw an idiot faced with his natural enemy, the fucker, he knew whose side he was on.” Gessen’s n+1 colleague Benjamin Kunkel lauds on the back of the book “the classical or Fitzgeraldian excellence to the prose,” and one can see why.
I haven’t even told you yet about our third sad young literary man, Mark, who’s writing a dissertation on the Mensheviks while feeling like a bit of loser himself, particularly in—you guessed it—the sexual arena. I’ll spare you the details; suffice it to say that on a day when he wants to feel like a winner and go to bed with a woman, he asks himself, “What would Lenin do?” Eventually, it’s strongly implied that he will return to his cute, shy, vaguely saintly Russian ex-wife rather than even defending his dissertation, thus preferring Holy Mother Russia to its godless defilers in what is probably unintentional but no less gorge-convulsing symbolism.
At last we come to an epilogue in which Keith narrates his life in the present as a liberal commentator, suddenly blindsided by the possible pregnancy of his much younger girlfriend (and Mark’s ex-girlfriend and student) Gwyn. He goes out to play some football–all three of our sad young literary men are athletes, as if anything less would be somehow girly—and then realizes that Gwyn could have gone off for an abortion in the time he was gone. He rushes back to his apartment, and here the novel ends:
…it wasn’t over yet, I thought, remembering my friends at Debate [Gessen's thinly-veiled version of Dissent magazine], my gentle social-democratic friends—there was still work to be done. A cabal of liars and hypocrites had stolen the White House, launched a criminal war, bankrupted our treasury, and authorized torture in our prisons. And now it was too late, as I have said—but also, you know, not too late. We had to live. And there were enough of us, I thought, if we just stuck together. We would take back the White House, and the statehouses and city halls and town councils. We’d keep the Congress. And in order to ensure a permanent left majority, Gwyn, we’d have many left-wing babies. My love.
I turned the corner finally, unlocked the door, and bounded up the stairs.
If this is a joke, it’s not very funny: after all, it’s suggested that Keith has narrated this entire book, surveying his past from the position of present enlightenment. If the puerility of this last paragraph is any indication, however, he has no enlightenment; he and we have learned nothing and may never learn anything—unless the open ending, which is by now just a genre device of the literary novel, indicates that all enlightenment waits in the future, in which case the novel was still a waste of time.
If this isn’t a joke, if Gessen means us to take this as a serious thought, then it is foolish as politics—a lot of gentle social democrats who write for Dissent supported the criminal war, and there’s no indication that a Democratic president and congress would not launch further imperial wars—and also morally retrograde, positioning women as child-bearing kitchen bitches for the revolution, or, in this painful case, for the reform.
All the Sad Young Literary Men is a narcissistic novel that thinks joking about its narcissism will mitigate the aesthetic and political offense. I would not argue that those of the upper classes write worser fiction than those of the lower classes—Tolstoy, after all, was a landed aristocrat—but I will say that certain books get published because their upper-class writers have connections that the talents among the hoi polloi cannot afford to make. This is a sad book in more ways than one.
