All the Sad Young Literary Men
by Keith Gessen
(Viking) $24.95
Keith Gessen’s novel-in-stories, All the Sad Young Literary
Men, is a wry homage to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s All the Sad Young
Men. Where Fitzgerald portrayed the maudlin purposelessness of the
overwealthy, Gessen describes the lassitude and neuroses of the
overeducated. Harvard, like a trust fund, gives Gessen’s young literary
men a heightened sense of their own importance that is at odds with the
normalcy of their abilities. And while the snarky might say that’s a
tune more suited to the smallest violin than a novel, Gessen manages to
sprinkle charm over these young men as besotted with the grandeur of
history as Fitzgerald’s were with drink.
In each story, AtSYLM metaphorically mates love pangs with
political troubles: For Sam, perpetually failing to write the great
Zionist novel, women are like an intifada; for Mark, a graduate student
in Russian history, women are dangerous Bolsheviks to his idealistic
Mensheviks; and for Keith, the earnest cultural and political observer,
women are like writing itself, an activity he watches, worshipfully,
from afar. Taken too seriously, this structure would be as demeaning to
history as it is to women. But the book remains light and jocular,
endearing even in those places where it tries so hard to be funny.
Gessen is coeditor of the capaciously intelligent n+1, a
journal that says it “holds no value sacred but the need to rethink
every part of our life.” Some, I suppose, will be surprised that the
editor of a journal with such global ambitions would set them aside to
write a modest, humorous novel about the folly of pining after
greatness. Yet Gessen does just that with aplomb.
Keith Gessen reads Wed April 30 at Elliott Bay Book Company, 8
pm, free.